Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that projects how well a website is likely to rank on search results. Moz, a Seattle-based website analytical and SEO firm, developed the score. The DA score ranges from one to 100. A low score signifies a lower likelihood of ranking and a high score represents a higher chance of ranking.
Website owners and professional digital marketing services providers use the score to measure the efficacy of their SEO efforts and predict how well a website is likely to rank in search engine result pages.
At PeddleWeb, a fast-growing and trustworthy digital marketing company in India, we find out the DA score of our clients’ websites and help them improve their scores. In this blog post, we discuss seven ways businesses and website owners can enhance their domain authority.
- Optimize on-page content
Search engine optimization, especially on-page SEO, is extremely crucial for both rank on the search engine result pages and domain authority. Optimize on-page content including the title tags, meta tags, as well as image alt tags. Keep all URLs crisp and short, use synonyms for primary keywords, and create a sidebar for new posts. Enhance the keyword relevance and create in-depth and long-form content that covers a broad topic range.
- Leverage Google’s E-A-T
Google’s E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) is one of the most important ranking factors. Google determines E-A-T by a combination of factors and it is particularly crucial for websites that have ‘your money, your life’ content. To improve the E-A-T principle:
- Include sources from credible and authoritative websites
- Use statistics and facts to support claims
- Create unique and different content
- Update on-page content regularly
- Be extremely particular with grammar, punctuation, and style
- Moderate user-generated content
- Get high-quality backlinks
The quality of backlinks plays a critical role in calculating the domain authority of a website and it is one of the key ranking factors. An Ahrefs study revealed that more than half of the websites that don’t have any backlinks don’t get organic traffic. So, getting backlinks from high authority and quality websites should be at the top of the agenda to enhance the domain authority of your website. Guest posting is a sure shot and easy way of getting high-quality backlinks. Another way is to spy on the best-performing competitors and study their backlink sources and approach the same websites with the request to link back to your web pages and content.
- Optimize for mobile device
Mobile devices account for over 50 percent of online searches and website traffic. If your website is not mobile-friendly, it will alienate mobile users and will affect search engine ranks. To find out if your site is optimized for mobile, try Google Developers Mobile-Friendly Test. It will check the website and show how mobile-friendly the web pages are. To optimize a website for mobile, use responsive web design and compress the images. Don’t use flash files and improve the load speed of your website.
- Remove toxic links
From time to time, run an audit of your website and look for any spammy or toxic backlinks. The bad backlinks can hurt your site’s domain authority and can result in a penalty from Google. Consider using various SEO tools such as SEOPressor’s Link Manager or Ahrefs Backlink Checker to find out the presence of any harmful links on your site and remove them as soon as you find them. The advantage of using the tools is that you can check all the links on a specific web page and their status (if they are alive or dead) all at once. If you are unable to remove the bad links, use Google Search Console to ignore or disavow those links. Consequently, search engine bots will not consider spammy and toxic links while crawling and indexing.
- Optimize the user experience and website structure
User-friendliness and the website’s structure play a role in calculating the domain authority of your site. A website that has an optimized structure and user experience enable search engine bots to easily crawl through and index the web pages on search engine result pages. The best way to optimize the user experience is by creating a simple layout and making it easy for website visitors to navigate through the web pages. Mobile-friendly websites provide a better user experience owing to their use of responsive web design. When it comes to optimizing the website structure, creating a sitemap helps search engine crawlers to navigate through the site effortlessly. Using HTTPS encryption and SSL certificate enhances the site’s security and enhances the user experience.
- Enhance internal link structure
Internal links direct website visitors to go to relevant web pages and enhance their browsing experience. Apart from that, they enable search engine bots to crawl and index websites easily and find the connections between different web pages. However, some websites focus so much on building external links that they completely ignore the potential of internal links. There are many ways to enhance the interlinking structure. The easiest way is to create more related content as well as establish connections between different content. Many reputable websites use an optimum number of internal links in their web pages that play a key role in enhancing their domain authority.
To summarize,
The domain authority score projects a website’s overall performance and helps in comparing the score of competitors’ websites. At PeddleWeb, we study our clients’ past Domain Authority, take steps to increase their scores, and analyze competitors’ scores. If you want to improve your website’s DA score, contact us today.
