If you are familiar with SEO, you may have already heard of the term ‘Domain Authority’. It is one term that pops up over and over in the blogging community. Although, there are still many bloggers who are unaware of domain authority and its significance.
In this post, I’m going to tell you what domain authority is, how it’s important it is to your website, and how to increase yours.
WHAT IS DOMAIN AUTHORITY?
Domain authority is a metric developed by the SEO company Moz to measure how well a website is likely to perform in search engine results. It rates how well a website will rank of a scale of 1-100 – 1 being the worst and 100 being the best – which means the higher the domain authority of a website, the higher it ranks in search engines such as Google.
It is a good way to measure SEO, as well as to compare how popular your website is compared to your competitor’s websites.
However, domain authority is different to page authority, which is a similar metric but instead of measuring the strength of an entire domain, it measures the ranking strength of a single web page.
It’s a logarithmic scale which means that it’s a lot easier to increase your domain authority if it’s lower at 20 than it is to increase your score if you were at 70.
Moz says that a domain authority between 40 and 50 is considered an average score, between 50 and 60 is considered good and a score over 60 is considered excellent.
HOW IS DOMAIN AUTHORITY CALCULATED?
Moz determines your domain authority score using over 40 different factors, but some of the most important are:
- Linking root domains – this is the number of unique backlinks your website has. If you have only 2 websites linking back to your website, you have two linking root domains. It’s important to have links from lots of quality websites as this will boost your ranking and your domain authority.
- Quality content – It’s no surprise that content is one of the most important factors that has an impact on search engine ranking.
- Search engine friendliness – This means that the better the structure of your site, how easy it is to navigate around and how user friendly it is, the better it will rank.
HOW DO I CHECK MY DOMAIN AUTHORITY?
There are a number of domain authority checkers available online to check your score. The most popular is Moz’s Link Explorer where you type in your domain or sub-domain address, and it shows you your current Domain Authority rating.
HOW TO INCREASE YOUR DOMAIN AUTHORITY
By increasing your score, you are also increasing your chances of ranking higher in search engine results. When it comes to link building, you should try to build links with websites who have a good domain authority. A lot of people believe that buying backlinks or getting links from low quality sites will be beneficial for them, however this is not the case and you will do more harm than good.
Another great way to increase your domain rating is to increase the internal linking within your website. Make sure that every post on your site is link to 2-3 other posts on your blog, and every time you publish a new blog post, link it to previous blog posts.
Along with creating new links, you should also keep an eye out for any back links that pop up pointing to your site. Whenever you find a bad site linking to your site, ensure you get it removed by contacting the owner of the site, or use the Google Disavow tool to make sure search engines ignore those links.
You can also ensure an increase in your domain authority if you make sure the quality of your posts is good. Remember it’s quality, not quantity, so publishing fewer, more descriptive posts a month is better than rushing every post to put out more content every month.
Direct lots of your attention to speeding up your website, as google has made page load time an official ranking factor, which means the faster your site loads, the more google will like it.
I would advise you to check your domain authority score every 3 to 4 weeks, as this is how often Moz link analysis data is updated, so you should see an increase once you make any changes to your site.
