How to Improve Domain Authority In (2022)

Running an online business has a lot of benefits.

The ability to sell to anyone with Internet access is one of the main reasons entrepreneurs start a website and sell products and services on the platform.

But how do you make sure your website is reaching the right people?

Or, better yet, how do you make your site stand out from competitors when the Internet is so vast?

That’s where domain authority comes in. 

A website’s domain authority is something every business owner with an online platform must take into consideration if they want to expand their business.

This blog post encompasses everything you need to know about domain authority (DA), including several techniques to increase your domain authority score!

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority (DA) is a metric created by Moz to measure the strength of a website’s domain.

Additionally, this metric indicates the authority of a website or how relevant and informative it is given its specific niche.

It is a score from 1-100, with higher scores representing better performance on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

The score can be used to compare websites, and it helps inform website owners which SEO strategies they should implement.

Today, a website with good domain authority performs better on search engines like Google because they are seen as more important.

How Do “They” Calculate Domain Authority

Moz, a prominent SEO strategy software company, calculates domain authority metrics.

But how exactly is domain authority calculated?

According to Moz, they calculate a website’s domain authority by taking 40 different signals into consideration.

Some of these signals include the following:

• The quality and relevancy of inbound links
• The number of websites linking to your site
• The quality of your website’s content and pages
• The popularity of your domain on social media networks (sometimes referred to as Social Signals)
• Your website’s SEO performance and search engine ranking score

It takes a lot of work to build a good domain authority score overnight, especially if you are a small business.

However, it is undoubtedly feasible to increase your domain authority as well as your site’s overall SEO performance.

How Do I Find My Website’s DA Score?

Now that you understand how crucial a good domain authority score is, you’re probably curious about your own web page.

Fortunately, finding your website’s DA score is simple and only requires the following steps:

• Go to Moz domain analysis SEO tool
• Type in your website’s domain
• View the results

Further, Moz provides these statistics about a website’s domain:

• Domain authority score
• The number of linking root domains
• The number of ranking keywords
• Spam score (calculated as a percentage)

Domain Authority Vs. Domain Rating

Another metric for measuring a website’s domain performance is called domain rating (DR).

This score is given by Ahrefs, which measures the strength of a website’s backlinks.

Domain rating uses the same calculation principles as domain authority but provides different results.

Whereas DA focuses on 40 signals, DR looks at over 100 different signals, including the quality of websites linking to yours and their domain authority.

Furthermore, Ahrefs explains that a website’s domain rating is determined by “the number and strength of all external backlinks pointing to an entire domain or subdomain.”

In other words, while Moz focuses on the number of your website’s backlinks, Ahrefs looks at the quality of those links.

Why is Domain Rating Important?

Domain rating is critical because it helps you determine which websites are linking to yours and how authoritative they are in their respective industries.

This information can help you optimize your SEO and implement strategies to ensure that your website is associated with high-quality backlinks.

Additionally, domain rating can give you insight into how competitive certain keywords are and the type of content and websites that rank for them.

Overall, domain rating helps give you a better understanding of how search engine algorithms evaluate your website’s authority.

Domain Authority Score Vs. Page Authority Score

In addition to domain authority scores, page authority scores are important factors to consider when evaluating your website’s overall SEO.

Page authority is a metric that measures the power of an individual web page. 

Simply put, the higher your page authority score, the better your chances of ranking in search engine result pages and getting organic traffic to your page.

Page authority considers the same factors as domain authority, but it focuses on individual web pages rather than an entire website or domain.

It’s important to note that page authority is not a ranking factor used by Google search results; instead, it simply gives you a better understanding of how powerful your individual pages are and what results they can bring.

Furthermore, page authority is calculated using a different algorithm than domain authority.

The authority metric takes into account the following information:

• The number of backlinks to the page
• The quality of the backlinks
• The relevance of the backlinks

By understanding both domain authority and page authority scores, you can gain a better understanding of your website’s SEO performance and make data-driven decisions to improve your rankings.

So, How Do You Increase Domain Authority?

Now that you understand how vital a good Moz domain authority score is to boost your website’s performance, it’s time to learn how to actually improve the metric.

Some of the most popular ways to boost your Moz domain authority score include:

• Implementing a link building strategy
• Focusing on on-page SEO
• Optimizing your website
• Building a well-performing social profile

1. Link Building

Link building is one of the most important components of a successful search engine optimization strategy.

Additionally, a good link building strategy helps increase your domain authority.

Simply put, link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to yours in order to improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search engine result pages.

Here is everything you need to know about building a solid link profile!

What Does A Strong Link Profile Look Like?

Building domain authority relies on building a strong link profile.

A strong link profile means a website has the following components:

• Incoming links (also called backlinks) from quality websites
• Inbound links pointing to the website come from related sites
• Little to no low-quality links
• High-quality links come from a number of unique domains

Improving your link profile is known as “off-page SEO.”

Further, building a strong link profile involves using techniques to find quality links that will improve your overall website authority.

Should You Remove Bad Links From Your Profile?

Yes, removing low-quality content and links from your website is integral in making your profile stronger.

SEO software from Moz Explorer or SEMrush can quickly identify which links on your profile are of low quality.

Then, you can contact the owners of these websites and ask them to either:

• Remove the link from their site
• Add the “nofollow tag” to devalue the link

If the webmaster fails to do either of the previously mentioned options, you can use the Google disavow tool to remove the poor links from your profile.

How Do You Build High Authority Backlinks?

Improving website domain authority involves gaining high-authority backlinks from other websites.

It sounds easy enough, but this is one of the most challenging aspects of improving SEO for first-time site managers.

Still, there are a lot of ways to gain backlinks from high-authority websites. 

Here are some of the most popular ways!

Link Building Outreach 

One way to get quality site links on your website is to reach out to other web admins and ask for backlinks.

When reaching out to other websites, make sure they are somewhat related to your site’s niche.

Remember, you want to attract your target audience, so it only makes sense for your website to be on others with similar interests.

For example, if you run a camping supplies website, you probably wouldn’t want to ask for a backlink from a luxury jewelry site.

As you can imagine, link building outreach takes a little more time than other SEO tools available.

However, there are several pre-composed templates online that will help you construct a cold pitch must faster.

An excellent way to find other sites related to yours is to do a Google search with keywords related to your niche.

By doing this, a search engine does the hard part (finding high-authority sites related to your website) for you!

Guest Blogging 

Guest blogging is another great way to build a strong link profile.

Guest blogging involves writing content for other websites’ blogs that links back to your website.

This can provide you with quality backlinks from sites related to your niche and with good domain authority scores.

For example, if you run a website about camping, you can write content for other camping websites or blogs and include a link to your website.

When looking for guest posting opportunities, you should look for websites that have the following:

• Good DA scores
• Sites that are related to your niche
• A website that is looking for contributors

Some websites will advertise directly on their website that they are looking for guest posting content.

You can also search on Google and social media platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn to find sites that may be interested in working with you for guest posting opportunities.

Once you’ve identified these websites, contact them directly and ask if they would be open to having you write content for their blog.

Reaching out to various sites can become time-consuming, so it is important to remain patient and persistent.

Broken Link Building 

A broken link is a web page that users cannot find or access for any number of reasons.

Typically, web servers will show an error message when there is a broken link, like one of the following:

• 404 Page Not Found
• 400 Bad Request
• Timeout message

Broken links impact your domain authority because they negatively impact your Google Search results.

Further, Google views a site with numerous broken links as a low-quality website.

Therefore, if you have a lot of broken links on your website, the odds of being one of the top-ranking pages on Google are very slim.

Implementing a broken link campaign is a great way to identify and eliminate any broken backlinks on other sites.

The best way to quickly find broken backlinks is by using SEO software specially designed for this process.

Tools like Moz Link Explorer or LinkMiner are two easy-to-use techniques to help you locate any broken backlinks on the web.

From there, you must personally reach out to the web admins hosting your broken link and ask to either change it to the correct address or remove it altogether.

Although this may sound like a burden on you, fixing broken links is an easy way to build domain authority.

Content Promotion 

Content promotion can help you increase your site’s domain authority score and overall SEO performance.

Content promotion (also called content marketing) is getting your website’s name out there to gain external links leading to your landing page.

One great thing about content promotion is that you can take numerous different actions.

Depending on your website’s niche, one technique may make more sense to use compared to another.

Some of the content promotion techniques that help encourage SEO success include the following:

• A blog post on another website in your business’s niche
• Interviews of industry leaders on your website
• Infographics
• Local PR
• Whitepapers
• HARO links

Basically, any action that helps promote your website and what you have to offer counts as content promotion.

Using social media is an excellent budget-friendly option to market your content.

Still, ensure your social media presence matches your website’s, so there is a consistent tone throughout all your platforms.

Also, if you’re newer to social media, stick to two or three platforms to start.

It’s better to create quality content on a handful of sites rather than stretching yourself too thin by trying to be on every social media platform. 

The most crucial detail to keep in mind about content marketing is to stay patient with the results.

You may not see immediate success, and that’s okay!

By continuing to produce high-quality content, you set yourself up for a boost in your site’s domain authority.

Natural Link Building 

Natural link building is one of the long ways to get high-authority websites to link to your site.

This type of link building is when your website has high-quality content and attracts links from other sites.

So, when a web admin from a different site finds your content, likes it, and links it from one of their articles, that is an example of natural link building.

For natural link building to work, your website must have the following:

• Insightful content
• Content that is accurate and reliable
• Content that is easy to read

Although acquiring high-quality backlinks from websites through natural link building takes a little time (because your site needs to gain readership), it is a beneficial process.

If you have just started a website, natural link building won’t be your go-to strategy.

Still, remember that down the road, this will be an effective way to increase your DA score.

The best way to ensure your website achieves natural link building is to ensure your content is link-worthy and of the best quality possible. 

Use Link Building Services

The easiest way to get more linking domains to your website is through link building services.

These services help you earn valuable inbound links to your website from high-DA sites.

The price for these services ranges based on the company you work with and the products you purchase for your site.

Some of the link building tools available through these companies include the following:

• Guest post on another website in your niche
• Identifying target keywords for your website
• Content marketing
• HARO links
• Finding curated links on other sites

Keep in mind that his SEO strategy will cost you a little money.

However, you won’t be left trying to figure everything out by yourself.

Instead, a group of professionals handles everything.

If you’re not sure where to start, here is a list of companies that can help build your internal link structure and DA score:

• Rhino Rank
• SEMRush
• FATJOE
• PageOne Power

Lastly, outsourcing your link building efforts allows you to spend more time on what you know best; your business!

2. On-page SEO

The next step to increase your domain authority is focusing on on-page SEO.

On-page SEO is about optimizing your website’s page(s) and content.

The most important factors to consider when discussing on-page SEO are the following:

• Proper use of headings (H1 and H2) throughout your content
• URL structure
• SEO optimized permalinks
• Optimized titles and product/service descriptions
• Optimizing images, videos, and other media elements
• Using keywords naturally in your site’s content (not keyword stuffing)
• Adding internal links to your content
• Formatting your content and site structure, so it ranks higher on Google

No matter what, ensuring the content on the website is of high quality is the most important factor for on-page and off-page SEO!

Still, there are even more ways to improve on-page SEO on your site.

Let’s take a look at a few ways below!

Optimize Metadata

Metadata is what visitors see when they find your website on a search engine results page (SERP).

It includes things like the following:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Other SEO-related information

Optimizing metadata helps ensure that potential customers click through to your website instead of someone else’s. 

You can optimize your metadata by following these steps:

• Research the keywords that you want to use in a title tag, description, and other tags
• Make sure to include those keywords without stuffing them into the text
• Use unique and descriptive titles and descriptions for each page on your website
• Re-check the length of titles and descriptions to make sure they’re within the limits
• Run a check on all meta tags to ensure that they are properly formatted

By taking these steps, you can make sure your website appears in search engine results pages more often and increases its visibility.

Optimizing metadata is an important on-page SEO tool to consider when increasing domain authority and traffic to your website.

Optimize Your URLs

URLs are one of the most important parts of on-page SEO because they help search engine robots and users better understand your website.

When it comes to optimizing your URLs, you need to make sure that they are both keyword-rich and concise to maximize their effectiveness.

Further, here are some tips for optimizing your website’s root domains:

• Using hyphens to separate words within the URL
• Including keywords at the beginning of your URL, as search engines give priority to those
• Keeping URLs concise and avoiding long strings of characters, numbers, or unnecessary words
• Ensuring that each page on your website has its own unique URL rather than one that is used for multiple pages

Optimizing your website’s URLs can help you increase its visibility in search engine results pages, which will ultimately lead to more traffic and a higher DA score.

An optimized URL is concise, accurately reflects the content on the page, and uses words or phrases that people might search for.

A poorly optimized URL is overly long, contains irrelevant words or numbers, and does not accurately describe the page’s content.

For example, a well-optimized URL could be “example.com/keyword,” which accurately reflects the page’s content and uses a keyword that may be searched for.

A poorly optimized URL could be “example.com/category/subcategory1/subcategory2/product-description1234”, which is much too long and doesn’t give any indication as to what type of content is on the page.

Ensuring that URLs are accurately optimized helps to improve search engine visibility and user experience.

Optimizing a URL also ensures that a website’s content is organized in an easily recognizable way, making it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

Overall, having well-optimized URLs will help to improve your website’s traffic, visibility, and usability.

Optimize Your Image ALT Tags

Image optimization is an important part of on-page SEO and can help to improve a website’s ranking in search engines.

One way to optimize images for better SEO performance is to use descriptive ALT tags for the images you use on your page.

ALT tags are short pieces of text describing what the page’s image is about. 

ALT tags should accurately reflect the image’s content and include relevant keywords to help search engine robots understand what your website is about.

Using ALT tags for images can also help to improve user experience as the tags are read aloud by certain browsers that convert text into audio.

This helps people with visual impairments understand a web page’s content.

By taking the time to optimize your image ALT tags, you can help ensure that your website’s ranking factor and ensure it appears in more relevant search engine results pages and improves its SEO performance.

This can ultimately increase domain authority and visitor traffic for your website.

Add Internal & External Links to Your Articles

Adding internal and external links to your web pages is an important on-page SEO tool that can help promote a higher domain authority score.

Internal links are linking domains from one page on your website to another page within the same domain.

Internal links help search engine robots better understand the site structure, leading to higher rankings and better visibility in search engine results pages.

External links are links from one website to another outside of the same domain.

These links help establish trust between your website and others, which can lead to a higher DA score.

When adding external and internal links to your articles, it is important to ensure that they are relevant to the content of your page.

For example, if you have a blog post about SEO techniques, it would be appropriate to have links pointing to other sites with more detailed information on those topics.

External and internal links should also be placed in context and not inserted randomly into an article. 

This can help ensure that readers stay on the page longer, which can increase organic traffic and ensure you have high domain authority.

Overall, using internal and external links is a great way to improve your website’s domain authority and organic search visibility.

By taking the time to build links into your articles, you can help build trust between your website and other web pages, resulting in improved domain authority and better SEO performance.

Write the Right Amount of Content

The length of an article or webpage can significantly affect its SEO performance.

It is essential to write content that is relevant and has enough detail to provide value to the reader.

On average, it is best practice to aim for around 500 words per page.

However, this may vary depending on the type of content and the topic of the page.

Use a Content Writing Tool

Using a content writing tool can help to improve your website’s SEO performance by ensuring that all the necessary elements are in place.

Content writing tools provide features such as:

• Keyword optimization
• Grammar and readability checks
• Plagiarism detection
• And more!

These tools provide an easy way to create optimized content with minimal effort on your end. 

3. Make Sure the Website Is Optimized

A third element that helps increase domain authority is optimizing your website.

Attracting links from legitimate sites, boosting a site’s ranking factor, and improving website domain authority can all happen when your site’s optimized.

Create an XML or HTML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages and root domains on your website and allows search engines to access them quickly for indexing.

HTML sitemaps are web pages that list outbound links to other pages within the domain.

Creating an XML or HTML sitemap helps search engines to find and crawl pages on your website quickly and accurately, allowing them to index the content more effectively.

This can lead to higher rankings in search engine results pages, which in turn can ensure your site has a high domain authority.

Make Sure Your Site Speed is in Check

Site speed is another crucial factor to consider when looking at quality websites.

A slow site will not only impact the user experience, but it can also have a negative effect on SEO performance and domain authority score.

You should use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check your website’s loading speed and make sure that the page is loading quickly.

A good website speed should be under three seconds. However, it may take longer to load if you have a more complex site with lots of images and media content. 

In this case, consider making use of caching technologies such as CDN services or web accelerators to improve the site’s loading speed.

Add Schema to Your Pages

Adding schema to your website’s pages is a great way to build a high-authority domain.

Schema is a language search engines use to understand the content of web pages more clearly and accurately.

By using structured data markup, you can give search engines more detailed information about your content, allowing them to serve up more relevant search results to users. 

Schema can also help improve click-through rates, as pages with structured data markup tend to appear higher in the search engine results pages.

Adding schema is relatively easy and can be done on most CMS platforms.

It would be best to use Google’s structured data markup helper or other third-party tools such as Schema App to get started.

Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly

Finally, it is essential to make sure you build mobile-friendly links on your website.

As more and more people access the Internet from their mobile devices, ensuring your site works well on mobile devices is becoming increasingly important for SEO performance and domain authority.

You should use tools such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test or Hubspot’s Mobile Optimization Test to check if your website is optimized for mobile devices.

If the website does not pass these tests, you should use a responsive design or a separate mobile-friendly version of the site to ensure that it’s easy to navigate and view on all types of devices.

4. Get Your Socials in Check

Whether you want to improve your company’s or your own domain authority, ensuring your social media presence if solidified is integral.

Social media is an excellent way to get link-worthy content on your website while improving domain authority.

Here are some steps you can take to get your social media platforms in check!

Get a Social Profile on all the Major Social Channels

Creating a profile and actively engaging on the major social channels is essential for businesses wanting to increase their domain authority.

Some of the most important social platforms to establish profiles on include the following:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• YouTube

Engaging in conversations and sharing link-worthy content on these platforms can help to get your brand noticed and build a following, which will, in turn, result in more traffic to your website.

Also, engaging with other profiles on these platforms can help you create relationships, increasing the chances of them mentioning or linking back to your site via a guest post or an article.

Work On Your Follower Counts

It’s essential to work on increasing the follower counts of your social media profiles.

Having a lot of followers will help establish you as an authority in your industry, and it can also be seen as a sign of trustworthiness to those considering linking back to your website.

To increase your follower counts, you should optimize the content for each platform, making sure it appeals to their specific audiences. 

You can also use advertising or influencer marketing on social media to get more eyes on your profiles.

Finally, you should regularly engage with users who comment on and share your content, as this will help improve your website’s overall domain authority.

Get Social Media Buttons on Your Site

Adding social media buttons to your website is a great way to make sharing and linking to your content more accessible.

Having these buttons prominently featured on your site will encourage users to spread the word about your business, increasing the chances of others linking back to you.

These links can be beneficial for improving domain authority and helping to boost your SEO performance.

You should make sure that the social media buttons are clearly visible on all pages of your website, so users don’t have to go looking for them.

You can add these buttons by using a plugin, or you can manually code them into each page.

Conclusion

If you want to increase domain authority, it can be a long and challenging process, but it is possible to achieve it with the right strategies in place.

To improve your domain authority, you should focus on creating quality content that includes relevant keywords, obtaining backlinks from other authoritative sites, optimizing your site for SEO and mobile-friendliness, and increasing your social media presence.

By following the steps outlined above, you can increase your domain authority and improve your SEO performance!