Website Domain Authority: 11 Proven Strategies to Boost Your Domain
Unlike some years back, domain authority is a well known term today; this is because it plays a very vital role in bringing higher ranking to your personal or business website. But do you understand what domain authority actually means and how to increase it? Welcome to reading 11 practical steps to improving website domain authority.
Please bear in mind that boosting or increasing the domain authority of your website is not something that you should expect results overnight, it is a long-term project.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority (DA) connotes the total number of relevant links pointing to your own website from other authority websites. In addition, the uniqueness and relevance of those backlinks pointing to your site contributes immensely to your site score.
Domain Authority metric was created by Moz to help businesses figure out where they may rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Moz estimates a page’s current ranking using several channels which includes:
• linking root domains into a single DA score
• number of total links into a single DA score
This score is what compare websites or track the ‘ranking strength’ of any website over time.”
How Important is the Domain Name to Search Engine Ranking
Before attempting to improving website domain authority, one question that often keeps loitering around in the minds of web developers and those hiring these services is the impact that domain names have on search engines. The negative effects of not having good domain names is a riddle that very few have been able to solve and again, is something that remains an enigma.
The importance of domain names in search engines has been debated ever since the concept arose and it has consistently been buried and dug up from the ashes. Having said everything, it is imperative to know that domain names have a huge role to play in search engines and though small, the role is very critical. When one has possession of his own domain name, then the web address has the domain name in between www and .com. It adds a lot of professionalism to the name and projects it as very important.
Establishing credibility amongst customers on the web is the only way to make money. Being in possession of a self owned domain name is the first step towards that goal. Domain name registration service providers and domain hosting company Delhi, India service providers often say that having a domain name puts the customer at ease for the fact that they perceive the seller as the proprietor of a large organization rather than thinking of him as some amateur rookie. Ownership of the domain name gives the owner authority over the establishment of multiple aliases. All of them can be used for separate functions and subsequently, it helps in establishing a good customer base.
Helpful Tips: Benefits of using expired domains to boost your business website
Organizations often look for the home page of an individual domain and hence, it becomes imperative that the name of the domain is appropriate. The better the name is, the more are the chances of the domain scoring highly with consumers who type in the particular keyword into the search engines. Since there are plenty of competitors thronging the web all the time, not having the appropriate keyword in the web would only lead to a situation where business is fated to sink.
Domain name registration services and categorically, a good domain hosting Delhi company, India would always propagate the fact that the name needs to be as crisp as one can be. The absence of this factor in the domain would only lead to fragile and common results that any other competitor might also succeed in doing.
The biggest fact and question remains still unanswered! What is the importance of domain names on search engines? The gravity that the name of a domain holds is something that cannot be measured by instruments like the thermometer or the barometer and is something whose effect will be felt once it starts running on search engines. The most prudent and appropriate thing to do in such cases is to get a domain name which is near perfection and acts as an idyllic mascot for the website and becomes a magnet that starts showing its effect right away on search engines.
Below are 11 Practical steps to improving website domain authority:
1. Optimize your website structure
I want you to know that one of the factors used in calculating domain authority is the overall structure and user-friendliness of your site.
When your site is properly structured, search engines can easily crawl your web pages and index them on search results as quickly as possible. Also read Amazing advantages of building your business website on WordPress
One best way to help search engine crawlers is to create a sitemap in your site. Sitemap hosts all your important pages, thereby assisting search engines to navigate through your entire site with ease.
2. Optimize your user experience
The best and most profitable way to improving the user experience of your site is by firstly focusing on optimizing your site for mobile.
Recall that Google has now gone mobile-first, which means Google will first look at how well your website performs on mobile devices. It is therefore important that your site functions properly on mobile devices and loads quickly as well.
Another factor you must consider is the overall safety of your site, and the only globally accepted way is by getting an SSL certificates and moving your site over to HTTPS. You can also get hold of the best WordPress security plugins like WordFence, which offers many features like a web application firewall.
3. Work on your technical SEO
Technical SEO are those related to low-level SEO tasks, once you get your technical SEO correct from the beginning, you will never have to deal with it again.
However, if the technical SEO aspect of your website is not correctly put in place at the beginning, then this can have a huge impact on your Domain Authority and rankings in the future.
Below are the critical technical SEO you need:
• Add your site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools
• Create/create your XML sitemap and submit to Google
• Make sure your robots.txt settings and use Fetch as Google to ensure that Google and other search engine spiders crawls your website freely.
• Migrating your website to HTTPS
• Include structured data (schema) information to help search engines understand the context of your content.
• Have a properly defined breadcrumb menu on all pages
• Properly use of hreflang (in case you have a multilingual website)
4. Write quality contents
Another way to increase your domain authority is by writing great content that attracts external links. Remember, content is king.
When site visitors find your posts educative and helpful enough on the subject matter, they will give it a link on their own site, and also to share it with others. This way, you have chances of increasing backlinks from high-authority websites such as like educational institutions or governmental bodies.
With enough links from different sites, you stand the chance of boosting your root domains. All of the above work together to increase your site DA.
A great way to write new high quality contents is by looking at the most popular pages on your site and creates similar topics and content types.
5. Improve your page speed
One major factor that Google considers before ranking your site is your page speed. Websites that load faster, have an additional advantage of ranking higher over slower websites.
Remember, when your site loading speed improves, your rankings and domain authority increases, it will also make the user experience better and this translates to more sales, leads, and signups as the case may be.
I must confess that it’ is not always easy to tackle the page speed issue, this is because there are so much technical elements involved and if you are not a developer or someone with technical knowledge, it can be very frustrating.
Check the following tips if you cannot afford to hire a seo agency to increase the loading speed of your website:
• Remove unnecessary plugins and themes
• Regularly upgrade WordPress (and plugins) to their latest versions
• Ask your hosting provider to give you the report of your server’s performance.
• Upgrade your hosting to a more powerful server.
• Use a caching plugin (such as wp-rocket)
• Optimize the size of your images
• Use a streaming service (like YouTube) for videos
• Use CDN (content delivery network) in case you have big CSS files and many images
6. Buy high-quality backlinks from authority sites
Recall that backlinks plays major role in calculating a domain authority, and backlinks are one of the two most important ranking factors.
Ahrefs carried out a research and it showed that 55.24% of websites do not get any organic traffic because they are barren of backlinks. We can therefore agree that it’s mandatory for every website that wants to thrive to have some high-quality backlinks.
There are tons of ways you can get backlinks to strengthen your link profile. Begin by looking at your top referral sources and then find similar sites for backlink opportunities.
To reveal your top inbound link sources, use a plugin called MonsterInsights. It’s the best WordPress Google Analytics plugin which shows you detailed reports on your dashboard.
7. Do deep linking
You need to ensure that all the inner pages of your website are strongly built for your domain authority to improve. You must also optimize each of the pages of your site for the specific keyword that you are targeting.
Use different variations of the keyword that you are targeting so you can avoid repetition. Also make sure that all the linking phrases that you use have the same keywords and anchor text links attached.
Try as much as you can to get swarms of external links from other relevant websites. After creating these external links, do test them to be very sure that they are functioning perfectly.
8. Diversify your links
Diversification of links is an off-page idea that you need to understand for you to easily improve your Domain authority. To get better results, you must diversify the links by getting them from different related sources so that each link that you use is calculated as a different entity by search engines.
One most profitable way of diversifying your links is by making quality guest posts to different websites.
In the event that you are opportune to make a guest post to a website, if such site allows two or three back links in the article you are submitting, make sure you point one link to any of your previous posts in your site, another link to your home page and the final link pointed to the most trending category on your site.
It is very important that you do your link creation manually. If you find out that you cannot do this link creating on your own, it is highly recommended that you hire a professional to do it for you.
9. Audit your site/remove toxic links
Even though inbound links are very vital for your website to improve its DA and rankings, having bad links leads to disaster for your site.
Any links your site gets from a spammy website is potential enough to decrease your website’s domain authority drastically. This leads to Google penalizing your site.
To avoid such calamity from befalling your site, it is highly recommended that you should audit your site occasionally for toxic links and remove them as quickly as possible. There are different online SEO tools to identify harmful links.
Since your site is already in Google search console, all you have to do is sending a request to Google asking them to ignore those links to your domain. Once Google successfully disavow such links, it will no longer be counted for or against you when determining ranking in the search results.
10. Reduce low-quality backlinks
Not all links are created equal. To boost your domain authority score, you need to secure high-quality links and eliminate low-quality ones. But this begs the question: what’s a high-quality link?
A quality link which is the kind your website needs is the one that comes from a reputable site such as New York Times would be considered a very high-quality link because the publisher is known and respected globally by search engines and their bots. In the same vein, links that came from unknown or spammy websites will be considered low quality.
One very easiest way to identify and eliminate low-quality links is to use a tool like SEMrush. Once you have a comprehensive list of such links, manually remove them if possible, or disavow them through Google.
11. Having done all, be patient
Like I already mentioned in the introduction of this article, increasing your domain authority is never going to be an overnight thing.
It will take some time for Moz crawlers to read and evaluate your website again after you make any of the changes listed above; this is why you need to be patient.
Working systematically on improving your Google rankings will also have a positive effect on your domain authority score. Do not miss reading best strategies for website mobile optimization. Now read also Digital Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Difference?
