Saurabh W

Are you wondering how to improve your marketing plan? Or how to rank your website higher on Google? If so, then you might have heard the term “Domain Authority”.

For people working on search engine optimization it is important to know that among the several ranking factors on Google, domain authority is one of the important factors.

But, do you know what your domain authority is?

Let’s dive in to understand all about the term “ Domain Authority”

Table of Contents

• • What is Domain Authority?
  • What is a Backlink?
  • Why Backlinks?
  • What is a Good Domain Authority Score?
  • How is Domain Authority Calculated?
  • How to Boost Domain Authority?
  • How to Check Domain Authority?

 

What is Domain Authority?

 

Domain authority of a website is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Domain authority metric developed by Moz helps local businesses figure out where they may rank on search engines. They predict a page’s possible ranking through several channels, including hyperlinks to your website from another reputable site. Domain authority means the number of relevant backlinks your website has. The relevance of Backlinking also contributes to your Domain authority score.

But, how does Google determine what website to rank numbers 1, 2, and 3? 

It comes down to SEO, right? Well, it is more in-depth than that. Google has more than 200 factors; the number one factor that affects Google’s ranking is backlinks” 

what is a backlink? Why backlinking strategy is so crucial in 2022?

 

What is a Backlink?

 

Backlinks are incoming links or one-way links coming from one website to a page on another website. Google considers these backlinks as “votes”. You can link your website with another website that has the same industry as yours. 

For example, imagine that you published an article about “weight loss” on your website. Next, you might want website A, which has published an article on “weight loss diet plans” on his site to link to your website. In this case, Google will put more weight on links from sites about weight loss, weight loss diet plans, and so on. Here, website A has an external link to your website; your website has a backlink from the website.

 

Why backlinks?

Backlinks are votes from different websites. These votes increase the value and credibility of your content. More backlinks mean more votes, and more votes mean higher ranking. Pages with a high number of quality backlinks tend to have a higher ranking on Google search result pages. But, not all backlinks are valuable. 

A single but high-quality backlink from a relevant website having a high domain authority is more powerful than thousands of low-quality backlinks. 

Now that you know the advantages of backlinks, you can use them in your marketing strategies to improve your Domain authority ratings.

 

What is a Good Domain Authority Score?

 

Domain authority score ranges from 1 to 100. 100 DA score is like Google, a YouTube. It works on a logarithmic scale, in which it’s easier to go from 1 to 10, than going from 10 to 20. A high domain authority score means you are likely to see increased ranking and more traffic. 

So, if you can get a lot of backlinks, you can get them from relevant sites and you can get them from authoritative sites that have high domain authority, your rankings are going to climb up. When you launch a new website its domain authority is 1. Local businesses which have fewer backlinks have lower Domain authority scores (possibly between the range of 10 to 20).

DA score is categorized as:

• • Below 30 is poor
  • 30 to 40 is below average
  • 40 to 50 is average
  • 50 to 60 is good
  • 60 to 70 is very good
  • Above 80 is excellent

 

Domain authority helps you to find out a website’s performance in search engine results. Are you wondering how domain authority is calculated? 

Let’s find out…

 

How Domain Authority is Calculated?

 

Different tools use different methodologies to calculate Domain authority. Moz alone uses 40 different factors to provide you with a website’s Domain Authority score.

The following 5 factors are used to calculate the DA score

• • MozRank 

MozRank counts the number of incoming links to a web page. It also checks the quality of these websites that provides your page with an inbound link or a backlink.

• • Link Profile 

This includes internal links and external links from the web page. So, if your post links to a high-authority website and gets linked back by other websites with high domain authority, then you would get a good DA score.

• • Root Domains 

When looking at your website, Moz also looks for the number of unique backlinks. If you have several backlinks from a single website then Moz considers it as a single root domain. That is why it is important to get backlinks from different websites. 

• • Moz Trust 

Moz checks out the trustworthiness of the website linking to your site. If you get a link from a governmental site or a university website then you are likely to get a high domain authority score.

• • Website structure 

For a high Domain score, you need to make sure that your website structure is easy for web crawlers like Google for crawling your pages. You also have to provide a user-friendly structure to give a great user experience to your visitors.

 

How to Boost Domain Authority?

Boosting your website’s domain authority is a long-term process. More backlinks and better traffic can help you to increase your Domain authority. It’s important to focus on being the best resource for your users to improve your domain ratings.

Here are some ways to increase your website’s domain authority:

1. Acquire high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites 

 

Backlinks play a crucial role in calculating a site’s domain authority. But, the backlinks must be high-quality ones. According to a report, 53 % of websites don’t get any organic traffic since they don’t utilize backlinks. There are multiple ways to discover backlinks and strengthen your profile. To get started you can look into your top referral sources and find relevant sites for backlinking opportunities.

There are many tools that can help you spy on your competitor’s backlink sources, you can acquire the same for backlinking. You can also secure high-quality links from reputed websites through guest posting.

2. Create great content that’s link-worthy

 

By creating good content, you can compel visitors to link to your website. How a good content plays role in backlinking?  Well, if your content is helpful people will start to share your content with others. This increases your chances of getting backlinks from high-authority sites, like government websites, university sites, etc. Linking to a high-authority website will help you to boost your root domains and increase your domain authority score.

3. Remove bad links

Auditing your website is an important step to improving your DA score. While incoming links are vital for your website’s domain authority and ranking, having unnecessary bad links can affect your DA score. Links coming from spammy websites lead to more harm than good. Sometimes it can even lead to a penalty from Google. To prevent this from happening, you should audit your website and remove all the toxic links as soon as possible.  Using various SEO tools, you can identify harmful links and remove them easily from your website.

4. Optimize your website 

 

Always remember your website’s structure and user-friendliness are the factors that drive traffic to your website. With proper structure, search engines can crawl your web pages easily and index them on search results. You can create a sitemap in WordPress which will then help the search engine crawlers to navigate through relevant pages with ease. A sitemap includes all the important pages of your site.

Google has gone mobile-first, so you should check how well your website works on smartphones. You must ensure that your website functions properly, and loads quickly.  You must also ensure that your website is safe to use. This can be done by getting an SSL certificate and moving your website to HTTPS.

5. Improve internal links

 

To provide a better user experience and to reduce the bounce rate on your site you must improve your internal link structure. With internal links, you can help search engine bots to crawl your website and index your pages on search results. Another benefit of proper link structure is that it passes link juice from one page to another page. Link juice refers to the value of a page that is passed to other pages. It builds the trustworthiness of your website which adds up to boost your domain authority. Plugins like All in One SEO can help you to improve your internal linking strategy.

 

How to Check Domain Authority of a Website?

It’s really simple,

1. Ahrefs 

Go to ahrefs.com, put in a URL and you will get the domain authority score of your website. Ahrefs calls it a domain rating. It uses its own algorithm to calculate the DA score so you might see the variation in the score if you compare it with other tools.

2. Moz Link Explorer

Go to Moz Link Explorer, enter the URL of any website, and view the Domain Authority score. Moz Link explorer also provides information about the number of unique backlinks, root domains, and keywords ranking for a specific domain. 

3. SEMrush

Go to the backlink analytics in SEMrush, and view the domain authority score of your or your competitor’s website in the overview tab. SEMrush is a very popular SEO tool that provides data about the Domain authority of any website.

Various authority checker tools help to determine the current domain authority score of a website. The best practice is to check your Domain authority score once a month.

 

Conclusion 

Domain authority may seem complicated in the beginning, but all you have to do is put the right pieces in the right place to increase your DA steadily. 

Remember that the Domain authority score won’t climb up overnight. It is a long-term strategy. Utilize the points as we have explained in this article and wait for the results. 

For any queries on domain authority, message us or leave a comment.  

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