Did you know that 68% of the marketers use domain authority as a metric to evaluate the quality of the backlinks?
When it comes to increasing your visibility online, the term ‘Domain Authority’ is thrown around a lot. When you think How to increase my domain authority, there might be a number of ideas that come to mind.
However, there are several ideas that are potentially harmful to your site, so we’re here to help you follow the right ones.
Whether you’re a digital marketing veteran or newbie just getting your start in digitally marketing websites – Domain Authority is the center of everything you do.
For those of you who are well aware of it, you’re in luck! Because in this article, we’re going to go over some of the best ways to increase your domain authority.
However, for those of you who are familiar with it, don’t worry! Domain Authority is an important part of digital marketing, and we’ll be sure to explain its several nuances.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz, and is used to rank websites. It ranks a websites’ likelihood of ranking on search engines on a scale of 0-100.
Which means, if you have a good domain authority score, your website, and its pages will appear higher on search engines.
To be clear, Domain Authority is not used by Google or any other search engine. This is a score developed by MOZ that uses machine learning and a tonne of data that compares multiple sites’ relevance to specific topics.
However, it does this based on the way Google would most likely evaluate your page, and it does it quite well!
Domain Authority is based on certain criteria which are:
- The Quality of the information conveyed
- Information and centrality of the website
- The prestige the website and its authors
- The competitive situation around a subject
Thinking how to increase my domain authority is a crucial step to improving your search engine ranking
Here are 6 Ways to Increase Your Domain Authority:
1. Providing Value with Authoritative Content
With search engine ranking, it all boils down to authoritative content. Though there are many important factors when it comes to search engine results, search engines answer queries.
For example, if you were to go to Google and type how to increase my domain authority, Google will show you pages that know what they are talking about. Search engines aim to provide users with reliable information and sources.
If you provide digital marketing services for example, the language you use on your website and your website’s blogs should be well-informed and indicate expertise in your field. Also, if other people find your information reliable and valuable, they’re a lot more likely to link to your page.
The amazing thing about authoritative content is that Google encourages it, this means that if your site has accurate, well-informed information you’re more likely to get more traffic!
Here are a couple of ways you can make your content authoritative:
- Show Studies and Statistics
Though it can be difficult to do and at times boring, backing up your information with statistics is a great way to build trust. There are many things that are uncertain, however using statistics and studies can remove the uncertainty.
Regardless of what information you want to convey, using statistics is the best way to seem reliable. When it comes to search engines, they read these numbers and well-defined information as authoritative. With this, people are a lot more likely to link to your blog as a source and this will also boost your domain authority.
- Support your information with infographics, images and videos
Infographics, images and videos are a great way to get people’s attention. People respond well to visual stimuli. So, when there’s an infographic or relevant image that’s informative, people will be more likely to interact with it.
Another great thing about using infographics and images, is that you can rank with them on the image results page. Using images, infographics and videos that are correctly titled along with alt-tags, is a good way to build authority.
READ MORE
101 SEO Keywords for Photographers
- Use a unique or nuanced approach
When you put content out, it’s vital that you take a unique approach. Most things on the internet have already been written about. So it’s important that you contribute your own perspective and add conceptual ideas to topics.
When you’re able to give a new outlook or convey a concept in a nuanced way, it shows topical expertise. Even if there isn’t anything unique to tackle with a topic, approaching it from a new aspect can help you stand out.
- Break it down with analysis
When covering a topic, it would be wise to break it down into small parts. Even though this is what most people do, what would be smart is structuring it in a format that is appealing to search engines.
Using headers, bolding text, providing answers to queries and numbered lists are excellent ways to rank. Search engines like informational accuracy, making sure you tackle your topic in a structured manner for search engines, is a good way to go.
- Make it exciting and intriguing
Even though it’s a good thing to keep search engines in mind, you should always be sure to keep your reader’s experience the top priority. Some topics are complex and jargon heavy, however, when you share them you should make it easy to read.
You can be the biggest expert on any topic, but failing to let people understand your topic is a huge downfall. Remember, there is no such thing as a boring topic, but there are bad writers!
2. Using Authoritative Links
There are many links out there that you might want to link to your page, but before you go ahead with that, you should consider their domain authority.
The sites that you link to and sites that backlink to you, have an influence on your general domain authority. So, it only makes sense to use sites that are reputable, trustworthy and with quality content.
Making use of link equity with authoritative links
Domain authority is a good indicator of ‘link equity’, which is another word that is pretty important.
Link equity is a factor search engines use to rank your page. This can be based on internal links, as well as external links.
Search engines are bots that aim to understand how information is connected.
If they feel a source is trustworthy or authoritative, and it links to other websites, they’re a lot more likely to trust those sites as well. That’s exactly what link equity is, it is the value or authority sites have and can pass on to other sites.
Using authoritative sites helps grow your site’s link equity and can help you rank on search engines. Which will in turn improve the frequency of your pages and blogs ranking on search engines.
It’s another way to go about how to increase my domain authority.
3. Enhancing your Internal Link Structure
On your website, you can have several pages that all have relevant and quality information. However, it’s crucial that you link them internally in the right way.
It is important to link to your internal pages using relevant anchor text. Even though you may already be doing this, it’s vital to make sure that you do it with relevant content and with appropriate anchor text.
When it comes to anchor text, making sure that you don’t over-use keywords or keyword stuff is important. Google is very weary of keyword stuffing and this might hurt your ranking, so be sure to only use relevant phrases.
How does an internal link structure help?
An internal link structure helps Google understand the relevance of your website’s content. What this means is that Google can understand what you’re about, and index content accordingly. This can help you rank on Google and help lead the relevant traffic to your site.
On the other hand, it also helps with distributing link equity and establishing a content hierarchy. As we’ve mentioned, link equity helps with adding value or authority via links.
Internally, when you link the pages on your site relevantly, it will help users navigate your site and help Google rank your other pages as well.
Usually, your website’s homepage receives the most link equity. Linking content internally helps distribute this.
Also, it helps Google understand your content flow and establishes a hierarchy accordingly. What this means is that it helps with indexing and providing users with relevant content you may have.
4. Improving Your On-page SEO
Working on optimizing your website with the best on-page SEO practices can be very beneficial.
When people think of SEO they often think of targeting keywords which, if done wrong, can even lead to keyword stuffing. However, providing quality content that is properly structured, is irreplaceable.
On-page SEO adds long-term value to your page and can improve your domain authority. Not only that, on-page SEO can improve your traffic, ranking, SEO locally and also brand awareness. When it comes to domain authority, search engines aim for authority, relevant information and a user-friendly experience.
Here are some of the ways you can improve your On-page SEO
- Making sure header texts for titles and subheadings i.e, H1, H2….H5
- Using title tags, alt-tags, meta tags and meta descriptions
- Using numbered lists and bullet points to help with readability and structure
- Publishing relevant content, which is updated regularly
- Making your page responsive for quicker loading time and use on multiple devices
5. Using Link Building Strategies
Link building is the process of getting websites to backlink to your website. Even though using authoritative links is one part of link building, making sure relevant websites link to your page is the more important part.
Most link building for anyone with help of outreach. For those who aren’t familiar with it, outreach is essentially when you contact authoritative sites and pitch them content that will be beneficial to them. The way this helps is that you can ask them to include a link to your website, or link content you’ve made on a page of theirs.
Even though there are different ways to link build, this has proven to be one of the most effective ways to go about it.
READ MORE
Ways to Improve Domain Authority with Link Building Strategies
- Guest Posts
Guest posts are essentially blogs that you pitch to other websites in order to gain publicity. They get quality content, and in return you get a quality backlink. Though it can be hard work, it’s definitely worth the effort.
However, Making sure you do guest posts for blogs with relevance to your content and with good domain authority is quite important. There are many tools to help you out with pitching guest posts and some of them are:Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, Keyword Tool Dominator and Google Analytics.
- Press Releases
Another way you can build links is through pitching press releases and giving quotes in certain press releases. Even though this can be difficult at first, it can be quite useful if done properly. Useful tools to use for this are: HARO, Headline Analyzer and AnswerthePublic
- Claiming Broken Links and Finding Unlinked Mentions
After you ensure your website has quality content, you can look for broken links on relevant and authoritative websites which they can link to yours instead.
Even though this might be difficult at first, after you have some domain authority and relevant content, it’s a good way to go. The best part is you can replace this link on the multiple sites that it’s been mentioned.
Also, there are several sites that may mention your site as an authority for an infographic done or for a service offered. When this happens it would be a good idea to reach out to them via their contact details, and suggest they link to your site.
You can go about doing this with a tools ahrefs offers called the Site explorer and Content Explorer.
READ MORE
How to Build Links Fast (7 Tips)
6. Avoiding Usage of Bad or Unauthoritative Links
As we’ve mentioned the benefits of using authoritative links, It’s imperative that we mention the dangers of bad and unauthoritative links.
When you link to a specific page or get a page to backlink to you, it would be smart to run a backlink analysis of its website. Even though you might want to get as many backlinks as possible, it is vital that you choose quality over quantity.
Some pages you want to link to or backlink from, can be penalized, not authoritative or have spam like nature. This can prove to be harmful to your overall domain authority and can affect your ranking in the long run
It is important that you link to and from sites that are relevant to your content and that have high authority.
Also make sure that you audit the links you use in your content to ensure that none of them are broken – This too can affect your ranking!
Why is Domain Authority Relevant?
What domain authority does is rate something that is hard to rate. Even though domain authority is not the shortcut to success, it does prove a useful guideline.
How so? Well essentially, the way you see you’re good at a subject is by looking into the toppers. If the best students score a certain way in a subject, you can understand what a “good score” is. Based on that, you can improve the way you do things and even use what they do as reference.
With good domain authority you’re a lot more likely to rank, a lot more likely to appear for certain topics, and you’ll know who you’re competing with.
Domain authority is a good measure to help your site grow in a relevant and effective way, ensuring that you can rank on Google.
When I think about how to increase my domain authority, I keep the points covered in mind.
So if you’re looking for a way to take your site to the next level, we’d strongly recommend looking into improving your Domain Authority Score.
