[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]One of the important qualities of a website is it’s domain authority. Domain authority (DA) is denoted by a number ranging between 1 to 100. Naturally, the higher the number the higher you’ll rank on search engines.
Even though this figure was created by Moz and has no bearing on Google’s search rankings, this is still a good number to be aware for various reasons.
It’s a good reference to determine areas you can grow your website in a general sense. Furthermore, by boosting your domain authority, this could lead to boosting your page authority as well, which does matter more. Lastly, this can get you into good SEO practices which will make an impact on your page authority.
How Can I Boost Domain Authority?
Before jumping into details, there are few things I want to cover about domain authority.
First, domain authority is a wholly predictive number. Moz, along with many other domain authority checkers, use simplistic algorithms to determine these rankings.
So why should you be concerned about this number?
As I said, the things that domain authority is based on does relate to page ranking. I know this because domain authority takes into account 40 different signals. Signals that include:
- Number of links pointing to your website.
- Quality and relevancy of those links.
- Quality of your content.
- Social signals (like the popularity of your domain on social media)
- and general SEO performance.
While Google’s PageRank algorithm will check hundreds of factors, these few signals do connect with one another. As such, I think that by boosting your DA, you can make small impacts to your page rank.
With this said, here are some things you can do to eventually see a rise in DA.
Build Your Off-Page SEO
Links are the bread and butter of your website. Not only does DA care about it but Google also cares about backlinks too. You want to make sure that the links that are pointing to you also are strong links too. While you’re not going to be able to instruct who links to your site, there are some things you can do.
Before getting to that, you should know what makes a strong link. Strong links have the following qualities:
- They are high authority sites.
- The site is relevant to your website.
- The website that is linked to you doesn’t have bad links.
- The website has links pointing from unique domains.
If the links that are pointing to your website don’t have those particular qualities, you can do the following:
- Find the website and contact the owner to remove the link or add a “nofollow tag” that will devalue the link. You can see who is linking to your site using tools like Semrush or Moz Explorer.
- If your efforts don’t work, Google has developed a disavow tool that’ll remove links from your link profile
On the flip side, boosting your domain authority means gathering more links. You can do that in various ways but the most common is either naturally building up links. This is a matter of making content that people want to link to. The other option is reaching out to other bloggers and asking them if they’ll link to your page.
Optimize Your SEO
Another way to boost DA is through boosting your SEO. While outreaching to blogs and getting backlinks is a good start, focusing on your SEO on your website is key to. And there are lots of ways to do that. Here are some things you can work on for starters:
- Optimize your titles and descriptions. Make sure they have the keyword you are focusing on.
- Check your headings. Make sure you are putting headings and that they are relevant.
- Look at the URL structure and permalinks of your site.
- Optimize images, and videos.
- Make sure you are not keyword stuffing your content. The keywords you are using should naturally flow into your content.
- Ensure that you are internally linking. One link per post is good, but it doesn’t hurt to add a few more if they’re appropriate.
- Format your content in a way that they can appear in Google’s featured snippets. You might not get there right now, but who knows about the future.
Look At Technical SEO
If you’re optimizing your SEO, it’s worth looking at the technical side as well. These are low SEO tasks, however once they are done, they won’t be a problem. Naturally these will also help your DA too.
So what should you cover for that? Here are some ideas:
- Have your website registered with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools.
- Have a sitemap that’s sent to Google.
- Ensure search engines can crawl your website without issue.
- Get an SSL certificate. This will make your website https.
- Add structured data information.
Make It Mobile Friendly
Smartphones are the number one device people use to search the web these days making mobile friendly sites mandatory. Thankfully, many website builders have this in mind and have taken measures to ensure this.
That being said, there could be some other quirks in there and there are some ways that you can test it. Google has a mobile-friendly test that you can try. From there, you’ll get a report that outlines suggestions and other recommendations to make your site mobile ready.
Work On Page Speed
Page speed is something Google and DA care about as well and there is a lot of things you can do to boost speed. All of these things can give you an inch in speed, but that split second edge can add up over time.
So how can you improve speed? Some of the basics are the following:
- Remove unnecessary plugins.
- Make sure you are running the latest version of your site builder and plugins.
- You can also check server speeds from your own hosting provider too. The stronger the server is, the faster your site will be.
- Have a caching plugin.
- Reduce image file sizes (without compromising quality).
- Make sure the videos you have are from a streaming service.
Boost Social Signals
Even though Google has stated this isn’t a huge factor in determining rank, there is still a connection between high ranks on Google and social signals. Pages that are popular on Google will often have a lot of shares, likes, and tweets.
Boosting social signals is easy on paper, though will take time to build up. A lot of it requires marketing on social media of course, amongst other things. Some things to do are:
- Make sure you have social sharing buttons on your site.
- Build a following on social media sites. Boosting your following and getting people to love your content means they’ll share it.
- Better yet, build an active social media presence to ensure your posts will get more traction.
Be Patient And Boost Domain Authority
Like with building a business, a website takes time to build up anything. The key is to have a system in place and to ensure that you are remaining consistent. These particular methods I mentioned work double duty as you have seen. Not only will they boost domain authority, but Google will appreciate it as well.
Lastly, it’s important that you don’t make a big deal about this number. Yes, it’s important, but it’s not the biggest number that’ll dictate whether your site is good or not or if it’ll rank well or not. Use this as a way to gauge whether your SEO efforts are satisfactory to you.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_btn title=”Don’t have time? Talk to Mtek about Your Site SEO” style=”gradient-custom” gradient_custom_color_1=”#d87f31″ gradient_custom_color_2=”#db831e” size=”lg” align=”center” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mtekdigital.ca%2Fget-started%2F|title:Get%20Started||”][/vc_column][/vc_row]