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How to Increase Your Website’s Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is an important factor developed by Moz that helps determine how your website will rank in search engines. Domain Authority scores range from 1 to 100; the higher your domain authority score, the better your website will fare in search engine result pages (SERPs). It therefore follows that if you intend to boost your website’s chances of enjoying better visibility in search results, your domain authority score has to be very high.

So, what can you do to increase domain authority as the digital marketing space becomes even more competitive in 2021?

In this article, we’ll cover some simple steps you can take to increase the domain authority of your website, so you can improve your search engine rankings and enjoy better visibility.

Implement better on-page SEO

There are more than 65,000 searches carried out on Google every second. This number demonstrates that obtaining prime real estate on Google SERPs is going to require extra effort -and having a well planned out on-page SEO system is the first place to start. By properly implementing SEO on your website, you’re making it easy for search engines to find and index your site and make your content available in search results.

Well implemented on-page SEO will improve your quality score, which is needed to boost your domain authority. Thankfully, on-page SEO is not as difficult as it used to be, especially for websites built using WordPress.

If you have a WordPress website, there are several effective plugins you can install to manage your on-page SEO, such as the popular YOAST SEO, which also informs you if the keywords are not being used appropriately on the page. It also grades your content and checks if it’s long enough or if you’ve used the keyword enough times.

Non-WordPress website owners may want to consider hiring an expert to manage their SEO requirements.

Build quality links

For many years, link building has been one of the most effective ways of boosting page rankings, and the same techniques apply to boosting domain authority. However, when implementing your link building strategy, ensure you are actually building quality links. The quality of the website linking back to your page will have a lot to say about the score of your domain authority.

There are many methods you can adopt to build quality links back to your website, but the following two are amongst the most effective.

• Guest posting: Guest posting for blogs has long since been accepted as one of the fastest ways to build quality links to your website. Guest posting also drives direct traffic to your site via referrals. However, if you want to use guest posting to build quality links back to your website, ensure you go about doing it the right way. Most websites that accept guest posts have a policy you’ll have to follow otherwise your posts will not be accepted. One such policy is that you must not submit posts that are obvious advertisements.

It might be prudent to get a professional agency to handle your guest posting activities. This way, you ensure that quality posts that contain your link will be submitted to high authority websites. Once your guest posting efforts are up and running, you’re well on the way to improving your domain authority.

It’s important to point out that building domain authority takes time. Robert Rolls, Head of Online Business at Domain Names 4 Less (New Zealand’s prominent hosting provider) has a word of caution for website owners on this topic. He says:

“When starting the DA process, it’s important to have in mind that domain authority doesn’t increase overnight. It takes a lot of patience, a winning strategy and some luck in order to achieve an encouraging DA score.”

• Social media: Social media has effectively become the heart and soul of today’s marketing. It’s also a quick way to turn around your DA score. Almost every social media platform has an incredibly high domain authority, so when you share your content on these platforms, you’re effectively utilising their domain authority to boost your own.

Aside from this, a business that is very active on social media will attract lots of traffic from the various channels on which they are active. The secret is to always post engaging content and stay connected to your followers. Once your content begins to receive a large number of’ shares’ on social media, it will boost the credibility of your business and affect how Google sees your website. Therefore, being very active on social media will help you attract the attention of Google faster than you might expect.

Content is King

After all these years, content is still very much king when it comes to improving how both human users and search engines perceive you online. If your intention is to increase your domain authority score, you should focus on creating quality content and posting regularly. It doesn’t really matter if you’re posting long-form content or short form. What matters is that your content is credible, engaging and unique; these are surefire ingredients guaranteed to improve the appeal of your content.

It will also help to increase the relevance of your content if you can accompany it with high quality images and catchy videos. In fact, using more videos will actually drive more traffic to your website, as today’s internet users would rather watch what you have to say, than read it.

Optimise your site for speed and mobile

The websites that rule on the internet these days are those that are fast enough to meet the speed expectations of users and responsive enough to be useful across multiple devices. If your website isn’t fast enough for people who want to retrieve information from it – or it cannot display properly on mobile devices – this will lead to poor user experience. In turn, this will significantly increase your bounce rate and affect how Google sees your website. In this situation, you can only expect a poor domain authority score. Website speed and mobile responsiveness are therefore two very important factors that can affect your DA score.

Final words

As you implement your DA score improvement strategies, you’ll need to find out how effective they are. This means checking your DA score periodically. Because a domain authority score won’t increase overnight, give yourself a schedule of how long to wait in between checks. If your website is only a few months old, focus your energies on growing your website by constantly updating it with quality content and adhering to SEO best practices.

If you don’t have time or the inclination to work on your domain authority but want your website ranking better, give us a call on (02) 8211 0668 to see how we can help or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Hershey Pagtakhan

Having extensive experience in the Digital Marketing field, Hershey Pagtakhan makes sure that you have the right strategy to reach your target market. She knows when and where to push your digital marketing efforts to get the best results. A mother of two, a gamer and a believer that details are as important as the big picture.