What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is a metric developed by Moz that predicts how high or low a website will rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs). It ranges from one to one hundred.

It is important to note that it is not in fact a real rank score, it is just a predictive score that tries to guess how well a website will rank in the SERPs.

It does not affect the rank Google or Bing or any other search engine will assign to a website.

Domain authority from upwards of 50 is considered good, however, that does not mean that one should become complacent. It is a constant struggle and working hard to increase the authority little by little is the goal.

Domain authority is measured by several factors. Some of these factors are the number of links from other sites to yours, and the links from your sites to others.

9 Steps to Boost Your Authority

1.    Work on Your On-Page SEO

This one tip is a little obvious, but I will explain it just to clarify it a bit.

It refers to all the actions that you take to optimize the content on your blog.

For example, you will have to make sure that the keywords are correctly used.

Similarly, you should check and see if the format of your blog posts is correct. Search Engines use “crawlers” to peruse your website and see if its content is matching its keywords.

If you format your site properly with headings, keywords, and links, it will be easier for the crawlers to gauge your website and it can result in getting a better ranking in the SERPs.

Avoid using the keywords too many times. Search engines assume this as you trying to fool them and they penalize your website by ranking it lower.

Those of you who have a hard time doing SEO for your website can hire SEO experts to do it for you.

2.    Improve Internal Links

Good internal links go a long way to increase domain authority. If your website has great internal linking that allows users to seamlessly move from one page to another, it increases the chance of them landing on a page that they need.

This ultimately reduces the ‘bounce rate’ of your site.  A reduced bounce rate will contribute to raising your authority.

3.    Off-page SEO

This is more difficult than on-page SEO as it requires you to be patient and spend a lot of time on other websites in your niche.

Going to other blog posts related to your niche, commenting, liking, and giving genuinely helpful advice there helps a lot.

Doing this kind of thing makes you look more credible and that will naturally extend to your website. You can take this as a chance to promote your website if everyone is ok with it.

This is where you can increase your backlink (links on other sites that lead to your site) catalog. This directly contributes to increasing your domain authority.

It should be noted that off-page SEO will not show immediate results. It will take quite a lot of time and patience for the effects of off-page SEO to start showing.

4.    Monitor the Domain Authority of Your Competitors

Checking what your competitors are doing is a good way of knowing what strategies are working and what are not working.

It is possible that you may learn about some new keywords that you didn’t know about.

Use a reputable Domain Authority checker to monitor both your and your competitor’s authority to stay on top of your game.

5.    Have a Mobile-Friendly Site

An enormous amount of people accesses the internet through their smartphones.  According to Statista, approximately half of the website traffic in 2021 was due to mobile phone users.

This means that any website that does not work properly on mobile phones will be letting all of this traffic go to waste.

A mobile-friendly site will increase the accessibility of your website and that will result in increased traffic.

A large amount of traffic will lead to increased domain authority.

6.    Have a Fast Website

The attention spans of people in this day and age are very low. With so many things vying for their attention, anything that takes too long to show will be left behind.

If a website is too slow to load, people can become annoyed and leave rather than wait.

You can decrease your website’s loading times by reducing redirects, compressing any images, and enabling browser caching.

There are services that help you reduce your loading times so it can be a good idea to seek professional help.

7.    Inbound Link Evaluation

Bad links that lead back to your website are detrimental to its domain authority.

To be clear bad links are from websites that are:

• Not indexed.
• Give a virus warning.
• Spam sites.
• Have questionable content.

These links should be avoided at all costs.

A low-quality link is one that is from a website that has low authority.  These are not necessarily bad links. If they do not appear to be from a shady website then it is fine to leave them there.

It could happen that that site is on the rise and you can cash in on its fame. Removing those links can be a missed opportunity.

8.    Have a Steady Stream of Content?

Site content is very important. You need to have a steady amount of content coming out on your website in order for it to rank high.

Websites that do not have new and/or updated content will be given less priority by search engines, thereby decreasing their authority.

9.    Don’t Rush

There is no shortcut when it comes to boosting your domain authority, so you must take a breather and relax.

You just need to be consistent and your efforts will be rewarded in due time.

Never resort to black hat SEO tactics in order to boost your domain authority quickly, that can cause more harm instead.

Conclusion

These were 9 steps to increase the domain authority of your website.

One of these will work out in your favor one way or the other, who knows if you are lucky, you could be able to employ all of them and benefit.

Never forget step 9. It can be easy to get caught up in the fast pace of the internet world but slowing down and looking at things from a different perspective can help you keep on the right track.