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| Great Ways To Improve Your Website's Domain Authority |
The Domain Authority of any website reflects upon how well it is doing
in its field. Developed by Moz, this metric is one of the most important
ones in SEO, as it will dictate your prowess in search results. I
recently did an article on how to determine the authority of any domain,
in which I explained how you can tell two domains apart based on their
authority factors. As promised, I'm here again to discuss some of the
ways you can improve your domain authority.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority depends on a lot of factors, the most important of which is your link profile.
This pertains to how many backlinks are pointing towards your site, and
how authoritative are they. So as you can imagine, the domain authority
isn't an easy thing to influence. It's a site-wide ranking that will
only improve slowly.
If you're considering DA scores from Moz, that's a logarithmic scale
from 1-100. This means that it is easy to get from 1 to 20, and much
harder to get from 20 to 40. So don't be disappointed if your domain
authority doesn't rise up quickly. It's a slow process, and you'll reap
the benefits in the long run.
Here are some of the ways you can improve your Domain Authority;
1. Improve SEO
In order to improve your domain authority, you need to improve your
overall SEO, and that includes all the technical stuff such as site
structure, navigability, meta tags, URL structure, breadcrumbs, keywords, alt tags, and so on.
- Recommended: 20 Hot SEO Tactics Every Blogger Should Know
If your business is built around content marketing, which is what most
bloggers do, then you really need SEO to complement your efforts. Make
sure that your SEO is up to par before going any further.
2. Create linkable content
I am not going to repeat how you should write quality content, and how
content is king bla bla. Most of you know this major fact by now that
content is the most important part of your website. The trick, however,
is to create linkable content. What is linkable content, you ask?
Not every great piece of content you write would compel people to share
it and link to it. For example, news highlights get shared a lot, but
people rarely ever link to them. Tutorials get their portion of shares
and links, but what really makes content linkable is how unique it is
and how useful it is to others. People will link to your content if;
- It presents something new; an idea, a thought, a piece of research, and so on.
- It appeals to a person's emotions, i.e. people can relate to it. It can be an event, a story, anything.
- It can't be easily reproduced. People usually link to Wikipedia because it has so much information that they can't reproduce it themselves, and find it easier to just link to it. It something were easily reproducible, why wouldn't anyone want to spin it off and take credit instead of giving it? Infographics, in-depth articles, research work - these are things that can't be easily reproduced, and hence get a lot of links.
3. Internal-linking
Often overlooked in the craze over “high quality backlinks” is building
of high quality internal backlinks. I can’t overemphasize the importance
of internal linking. (See what I did there? That’s an internal link.)
Internal linking weaves a powerful network within your site that
benefits both the user and the search engines that crawl and index your
site. A site that lacks internal linking is like a collection of pebbles
— disconnected and weak. But a site that has strong internal linking
turns those pebbles into concrete — interconnected and unbreakable.
The great thing about having more content is that you’ll have more
content to link to. And the more you link internally, the greater your
ability to create a dense and powerful site network will be.
4. Clean up bad links
SEO isn’t all glory and grandeur. There’s the nitty gritty of wading
through spreadsheets and performing mind-numbing repetitive work.
It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. You’ve got to remove your toxic
backlinks. Every now and then, you should dig into your link profile,
find the spammy links, and get rid of them.
You’ll gain a huge competitive advantage by regularly cleaning your link
profile. In my experience, this isn’t something that most webmasters
are doing with any regularity. Sure, I see webmasters engage in clean-up
with a vengeance, but it’s only after they’ve experienced the slump of
an algorithm penalty or the heart-stopping experience of a manual
penalty.
Don’t wait till a penalty strikes you to clean up your link profile. Do
it now and then continue to do it on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.
Explaining how to remove toxic backlinks is outside the scope of this
article, so let me point you to some resources. This Quick Sprout
Traffic University video helps you understand whether you’re at risk for
a penalty, and this article on penalty recovery will show you exactly
what you need to do to clean up your link profile (even if you haven’t
been penalized).
This is the only way you’re going to have a tidy link profile — cleaning
it up regularly. You can build the most awesome link-backs the world
has ever seen, but if your profile is full of spammy backlinks, you’re
not going to experience the success you want from content marketing.
Your DA will remain low.
5. Patience is the key
One underestimated factor when it comes to domain authority is the age
of a domain. The older a domain, the better its chances of getting a
higher DA. As mentioned above, it takes time to build the domain
authority. If you're doing everything right, you should see your
authority rise slowly. It all doesn't happen within a day. You can’t
simply “improve your DA” by jiggering this and tweaking that. Instead,
you must look at the bigger picture of today’s SEO — it’s content
marketing. And you can only win in the other areas — domain authority,
traffic, organic search results, and ranking — by focusing on your
content.
In the end, it all comes down to content. Better content means better
everything else. You can improve your domain authority. It’s all about
your content.
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