5 Effective Ways to Improve Your Website’s Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is an important website metric for SEO. It is a score (on a scale of 100) developed by Moz which predicts how well a website will rank on search engines.

DA is calculated by combining several link metrics such as linking root domains, total number of backlinks to a site, and Moz’s own linking metrics such as MozRank, MozTrust, etc. In short, the greater your site’s DA, the more likely you are to have strong traffic.

Many SEO experts believe that DA is unalterable and something that we can’t change. However, there are some proven ways you can improve your website’s domain authority. In this article, we will explore ways to do just that. But before that here are 3 key things you need to understand about DA:

1. Domain authority is primarily based on the number of backlinks your site has and how authoritative these backlinks are.
2. Getting a DA score of 100 is difficult and rare. Only sites such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. have a DA of 100.
3. DA is difficult to influence directly.

So how do you improve your Domain Authority? For starters, make sure you’re doing these 5 things correctly:

1. Create high-quality content that is linkable

This may sound cliched, but content is one of the few things that has a direct impact on domain authority. Content marketing plays a key role in influencing the domain authority of your website.

So how do you create content that others constantly link to? One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating an infographic. Infographics are engaging and get shared a lot on social sites such as Pinterest and Tumblr. You can also gain authoritative backlinks by submitting your infographic to sites such as Visual.ly and DailyInfographic.

2. Ensure that your site’s technical SEO is good

In order to have a positive impact on domain authority, you need to improve the overall SEO of your website. Making sure that your site’s technical SEO is in place at the core of improving your site’s DA. Technical SEO are factors such as site speed, schema markup, meta data, HTML code length, etc.

Use a tool like GTMetrix to evaluate and improve the technical SEO aspects of your website.

3. Remove toxic backlinks on a regular basis

Your site will have a few toxic and spammy backlinks which may negatively infleunce your domain authority. As a result, you need to constatly check your site’s link profile and remove these toxic links to get your site back on Google’s good books.

Remove these bad links from your website on a monthly basis and you’ll see your site gain a competitive advantage. You may have the most authoritative links to your website, but if your link profile is filled with spammy backlinks, your site will suffer in SERPs.

Ahrefs is a great tool which can help you remove toxic backlinks from your website’s link profile. Here’s a blog post from Ahrefs that explains how you can find and remove toxic backlinks from your link profile.

4. Build strong internal links

Often overlooked by most SEO professionals in the quest to generate high quality backlinks, building strong internal backlinks is just as important to improve your website’s domain authority. It’s beneficial both for the user and the search engines that crawl and index your website. It’s a great way to generate organic traffic for your website and improve your site’s domain authority.

5. Be patient

One of the key factors to greater domain authority is the domain age. The older the domain, the greater its domain authority. So even if you create high-quality content, build strong internal links to your website and make sure the technical SEO of your site is good, your DA score may not outscore that of your competitors so easily.

To find out the domain age of your site, you can use this free domain age tool developed by Webconfs.com.

However, domain age doesn’t equal domain authority. If the domain isn’t constantly updated with rich content and still follows black hat SEO techniques, the DA of the site will automatically go down.

The most important thing to remember here is that it takes time to improve your DA. If you’re doing all the above steps as explained, you will notice a gradual rise in your site’s domain authority. It’s just not going to happen overnight.

Conclusion

Producing high-quality content on a consistent basis is key to positively influencing your website’s domain authority. As long as you are creating content that provides value to your target audience, you will see steady spike in your DA. Just focus on creating remarkable content and everything else will fall in place.

So what factors would you consider key to influencing domain authority? Let us know in the  comments section.

This blog was originally published at my marketing blog, 99signals.