How to Increase Domain Authority (A Definitive Guide)

Increase Domain Authority

Are you struggling to find the right approach to increase domain authority?

In general, many SEO specialists will say domain authority depends on the quality of content and you may say that’s right. But what are the factors affecting the quality of content and why some content can rank high in search engines without spending a penny on backlinks or promotion?

The thing is, the page’s popularity and ranking depend not only on the quality of your blog but also on the domain authority. Domains with higher DA (domain authority) have a higher chance to rank over pages belonging to domains with low DA.

Domain Authority is becoming the most important SEO ranking factor on Google. Increasing your Domain Authority seems like a daunting task when you have to start from scratch. Many people spend lots of money to get such high domain authority but it doesn’t have to cost you anything.

So before digging into various effective tips and tricks to increase domain authority fast let me first explain to you what is domain authority and how it’s calculated.

What is Domain Authority

Domain Authority is a metric developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). It ranges from 0 (lowest) to 100 (highest) and is based on various metrics relating to a website’s backlink profile, visitor traffic, social media influence and popularity, and more.

What is domain authority?

Domain authority shows your rank if you compare to other websites in the same niche. It’s part of Google’s ranking algorithm, and experts claim that DA 80-85 is the ideal rank because domains with this ranking tend to be trustworthy.

However, not to worry if your website or blog domain authority is not above 80 scores, it’s really difficult but at least you can work around increasing your domain authority to 45 to 50 very easily if you follow some rules from the very first day of your blogging journey. Domain authority can increase with time & hard work.

How to Increase Domain Authority

Domain Authority is one of the most important ranking factors of Google today, and that’s why it is right to say that DA is a crucial metric of SEO success.

If you want your content to rank on the first page of Google, there’s no other option than increasing your domain authority.

Recently a reader asked this question, “How to increase my blog’s domain authority?” Here is a guide to help you to improve your domain authority and get your content higher in rankings, traffic, and visibility.

So without wasting much time, let’s take a look at the most important factors which determines your domain authority,

1. Improve Your Backlinks Profile

Backlinks are the most important factor for a good ranking on the search engine ranking page. This is because backlinks from different websites and resources indicate that your website contains useful and valuable content making it authoritative in the eyes of Google’s bots.

Backlinks - Increase Domain Authority

Have you ever noticed that every time you search in Google for any Generic term like ‘ENGLISH’, you are going to find a Wikipedia page on the top? Why?

Because Wikipedia gets thousands of new backlinks from different sources like blogs, and forums. This makes Wikipedia a super authoritative site in the eyes of Google, and it’s obvious too.

You can create new backlinks by finding websites or blogs that are related to your niche and finding a way to link your website URL with them.

One of the important techniques you need to know and apply to your backlinking strategy is getting as many backlinks from different websites and domains. It’s not going to help you if you get backlinks from the same source.

Good Backlinks vs Bad Backlinks

Good Backlinks Bad Backlinks
  • Editorial Backlinks
  • Guest Blogging Links
  • Testimonial Backlinks
  • Press Release Backlinks (Newsworthy)
  • Insightful Comment Backlinks
  • Quality Business Profile Backlinks
  • Free Tool Backlinks
  • Spammy Blog Comments
  • Spammy Forum Comments
  • Paid Links
  • Irrelevant Directory Links
  • Single Site Backlinks

Though there are several methods you can follow to have backlinks to your site, the ultimate goal is to get quality over quantity. And to achieve that, the best two methods you can follow are,

Pitching for Guest Posts

Guest blogging offers you a platform to share your expertise in a specific niche. It’s one of the best ways to position yourself as an authority in your field and enables you to build backlinks to your site from other sites that also talk about the subject matter you cover.

The best place to discover guest posting opportunities is Google. You can search in Google entering keywords along with the following phrases,

  • Your keyword “write for us”
  • Your keyword “submit a guest post”
  • Your keyword “guidelines for guest posting”

You can also find guest posting opportunities by spying on your competitor’s backlink profile. You can use Backlink Analysis Tool to discover the sites on which your competitors have contributed as guest bloggers.

It’s very challenging to get a guest post approved on sites with high domain authority. But you can get started with sites having low domain authority and work your way up to the top. Start with blogs that are having mediocre DA scores (DA 40 and above) and progress to more established blogs in your niche as you master the art of writing insightful, resourceful content. (You can check domain authority for free at SEMRush.)

Publish In-depth Guides

If you need high-quality, relevant traffic to your website, consider writing in-depth Guides.

In-depth Guides are comprehensive guides on a single page that cover an entire topic. You’ll dominate the search results for your topic and get links, mentions, and social shares from more than one authoritative site.

People love to link to comprehensive guides because they’re a way for readers to learn all the key information about a topic in one place.

The very first step to creating a comprehensive guide is to search for a topic within your niche that has not been covered yet.

Comprehensive Guide Example
A perfect example of an In-Depth Guide (As seen on Backlinko.com)
Steps to Create a Comprehensive Guides
  1. Search for a topic within your niche that has not been covered yet.
  2. Research thoroughly, and make an outline for your guide.
  3. Do proper keyword research, and use related phrases to your main keyword.
  4. Write off your own

2. Create High-Quality Contents

Many factors influence your domain authority but one of these that you can easily control is the quality of your content.

Search Engines love to rank websites with high DA and this is done so by regular and qualitative content publications. If you provide high-quality content regularly then Google will see you as a valuable source of information and eventually promote your content to its users.

If your blog consists of low-quality content then you will never be able to compete with other authoritative blogs. Nowadays SEO is completely dependent on the content as it’s one of the important factors that influences (Google) algorithm.

Quality content helps in improving user engagement, organically attracting more traffic, and providing credibility to your website. It also helps in getting high authority backlinks.

What is Quality Content?

Quality content is those that increase brand awareness, rank well in search engines, get thousands of social share, and generate leads. In short, quality content compels visitors to read, share, and link to it.

To produce quality content there needs to be an element for hitting your balance between content marketing, brand utility, and user engagement. It is a mix of your research backed by facts and credibility, excellent writing skills, and compelling storytelling.

How to Create Quality Content

Content is King when it comes to internet marketing strategies. The higher the quality of content that you have, the more visitors will visit your website. But, how to ensure that your content is highly effective and optimized for SEO,

Check Your Competitors’ Content

What’s trending?

What type of content is working well for my competitors?

What topics are people in my industry discussing that I can also cover?

If you’re looking to create quality content that your target audience finds engaging and shareable, then it’s important to ask yourself these questions.

A good place to begin is by exploring your competitor’s sites and looking at what types of content they’re posting to their blogs. You can also see what kind of content is performing well for a particular topic in your industry or niche.

Extensive Keyword Research

Keyword research is a crucial part of content marketing. It requires detailed study and effort. If your content has been written without research, it will not be easy to rank on search engines, even if the content is SEO-friendly.

Before you can plan your entire set of keywords, create an extensive keyword research strategy. The very first step is to conduct keyword research on Google itself. This is called reverse engineering – an act of analyzing existing content, method, or structure. It simply means that you have to study the top 10 results on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) and create a better version to replace them.

Keyword Research SEMRush
A Glimpse of SEMRush KeyWord Research Tool

The next step is to collect all the important related keywords and questions that are also asked along with your main topic. You can combine Google’s own suggestion feature and Answer the Public to find them. Alternatively to get more precise data such as ‘search volume’ and ‘difficulty level’, you can use the SEMRush Keyword Magic tool.

Put Your Own Value

Whether you have personal experience supporting a thought or idea, or professional research concluding its validity (or lack thereof), weave in your expertise and facts to support why you’re writing your article.

Let’s take an example: Do women really want men to pay for dinner? That’s a heavily discussed topic in the modern dating world. You could have answered this question yourself by going on first dates and studying your girlfriends/boyfriends. You can publish a post with your insights on the subject, backed by data you received in the process.

Find a Different Approach

If the content is not unique and captivating, then it will be very hard for someone to pay attention to it and go through the whole article or blog.

This is true that you can learn from the experience of others. But your style should be unique, it should not mimic anybody in particular. Use your own words and most importantly show what you really have to contribute.

Use of Visual Elements

Visual content is a powerful tool for marketers when used correctly. Some 90 percent of the information transmitted to the brain is visual, which is why your audience has the strong urge to pause and scan visuals. It’s always been said that a picture speaks a thousand words.

Multimedia has become a serious and integral part of content marketing. People are using multimedia in their content more and more for several reasons. First, it helps break up the monotony that is typical text-based web content.

Adding photos, videos (arguably even infographics), and graphics give off the perception that you are creating substantial content which can help provide users with a positive user experience and brand image.

3. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to both the content and HTML source code of a webpage that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to inbound links and other external factors such as social signals.

On-page SEO is crucial for the success of your website. It can be difficult to implement at first but once you get started, it will become a natural part of your website maintenance routine. On-page SEO helps search engines analyze your website and the content connected to it such that it can assess whether it is relevant to a searcher’s query.

When it comes to optimizing your pages using various techniques, there are a ton of ways you can do it. There are, however, plenty of things you can do within the interface of most Content Management Systems (CMS) as well.

Titles and Metas

Optimizing your title tag and meta description is still worth doing, despite some of the latest updates from Google. Whether you’re new to SEO or a veteran, optimizing these two on your blog posts is still an incredibly beneficial task.

Title Tag and Meta Description
Optimize Title Tag

To improve your CTRs and conversions, you need to test different title tags. Titles are important, especially the ones in bold and which will be featured in the SERP snippet. They are required for SEO and help a lot with clicks. The main task is to write them in a way that will attract people, not keyword stuffing.

The title tag is an important element on the page because it’s the first thing that potential visitors see. The closer a keyword or phrase is to the beginning of your title tag, the more weight that keyword or phrase has with search engines.

For example, if you have two pages about ‘apple pie’, you could call one page ‘Healthy Apple Pie Recipe’ and another page ‘Homemade Apple Pie Recipe.’ Visitors who are interested in apple pie health benefits will be more likely to click on the Healthy Apple Pie Recipe link than those who are looking for homemade apple pie recipes.

Here’s a neat little hack you can use for your website title tags and search engine result listings that involve using modifiers in your title tag such as “best”, “guide”, “top” etc.

Optimize Meta Description

Meta descriptions are the short blurb of text that is shown below the title of a website on search engine results pages. They are an important part of your SEO, so it’s best to give them some attention. 

A good meta description can help your result stand out, which can boost your organic click-through rate (CTR).

A good meta description can be a window into your content. If your meta description is short and informative, users can quickly connect what they’re looking at with what your page has to offer. A clear, concise, interesting meta description can help convince searchers to click on your result over the others.

Including your keyword in your meta description can have a positive impact on your click-through rate. As long as you don’t get pushy with it, you should be okay. You should include the keyword somewhere between one and three times generally.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is a technique that can be used to help improve your search engine ranking. It is as important as inbound link building.

By spreading the link juice of your site across your entire website, you give Google a reason to have a positive opinion of your content as well as your site as a whole.

Internal linking is a way to draw the attention of your readers, and help them find other relevant articles on your website. If the content you provide through internal linking is relevant to your audience, they are more likely to read further articles. This helps to increase your site conversion rate.

Outbound Linking

External links to related pages is a long-standing optimization technique that was first introduced by SEO legend Rand Fishkin in 2009 with an insightful post about the benefits of outbound linking.

By linking out to content that is relevant for your users, you are giving Google topical signals about the content on your site. This can help Google better understand your website.

Additionally, external links to related pages can show Google that you are an authority on the topic. If Google considers your page to be an authority on its topic, it will be ranked higher in search results.

Speed Optimization

Speed plays a vital role in determining a website’s domain authority. And as soon as Google started caring about website loading speed (Core Web Vitals), it becomes a necessity.

It is true that your website speed heavily depends upon hosting quality, but there are still many scopes to optimize further by doing on-page optimizations like,

Caching

Caching is considered one of the most important factors in website optimization. It is a technique used to store copies of frequently requested web pages on proxy servers and utilize these copies to reduce latency.

For a seamless user experience, your visitors should be able to access all site content from their location, regardless of their physical location.

Caching provides an extra layer of protection if primary datacenter based systems experience issues. It optimizes the performance of your website.

Image Optimization

Websites are quickly becoming more and more image-driven – that is to say, users want visually appealing content. Images make users happy, but the downfall is that they can be large in size and slow your website down.

Page weight is important because ultimately we want users to have a great experience on our sites. Larger image files mean higher latency. Fortunately, there are scripts and plugins which allow us to optimize the images and reduce their size without impacting quality.

Your images are more than just pretty pictures. They’re your site’s workhorses. They not only help in maintaining site performance but also act as a hidden SEO tactic. With the right image SEO, you can give your website a boost in performance and user experience ranking.

Reducing JavaScript and CSS Calls

JavaScripts and CSS files are some integral parts of your website. If you have a lot of these on your site, it leads to a large no of HTTP requests when someone accesses your site, and if not properly addressed, this may lead to a slow loading website.

You can avoid this problem by combining and minifying all these JavaScript and CSS files into fewer files. If you are a WordPress user, you can use the built-in functionality within your Cache Plugins such as WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache.

Additionally, If you deactivate unused JavaScript and CSS files, request latency will be reduced. The website will become more responsive to your visitors. The Asset CleanUp plugin for WordPress does the job excellently.

Database Optimization

Your website relies on its database to keep running effectively, but it can get bloated with extra information such as past blog posts or comments. This clutter ruins speed and should be removed.

If you are using WordPress, you can consider using the WP-Optimize plugin. By using this plugin you can clean your WordPress database with just a few clicks and remove unnecessary records.

Avoid Unnecessary Plugins

When you install too many plugins on your site, you slow down your website. Your site’s performance may get worse because plugins take extra time to load and more resources are needed to run them.

Also, having a lot of plugins on your site makes it vulnerable to security issues.

4. Increase Social Signals

This is the era of Social Media Platforms. More than 4.5 Billion people are actively using Social Media, and it’s almost 60% of the total population on earth.

In the past, businesses could have little or no social media presence and still succeed. Those days are long gone. Now, your competitors can build a strong Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn audience and beat you to the top spot with ease. If you want to beat them to the top spot in search results, then you need to start thinking about your social media strategy in terms of SEO.

Google has publicly denied that they use social media signals as a ranking factor. Yet, we know there is a correlation. If you search for “social media SEO” or simply “SEO”, you will find several blogs, articles, and forum spokespersons stating otherwise. What are those claims?

Though Social Media signals do not count as a ranking factor, they can indirectly affect your search ranking.

How?

Builds Reader Trust

Social sharing for a website plays a vital role in improving a site’s popularity and traffic. Social media allows your articles to be shared and thus explored by a wide range of audiences.

A well-known fact is that social sharing makes your content go viral and drives more traffic to your website, thus helps building positive user engagement. Reader trust is an important factor that can affect your rankings in Google search results.

Social Media Profiles Rank in Google

While Google claims that social shares carry little weight in search rankings, many authoritative sources disagree.

When you search in Google for brand names, social profile pages often appear high up in the results. That’s because social profiles influence search results.

A social media profile is an important aspect of your business, a well-maintained social profile will rank higher in the search engine for the brand name. Thus, increasing the brand awareness and exposure, which in turn increases the overall search ranking of your site.

Creates Backlink Opportunities

As you know that link building is an integral part of SEO success. But what if I told you that social media could be as effective for link building as it is for traffic?

We all know that more social shares mean more traffic. The more people share your content, the more likely you’ll get links back to your website.

At the end of the day, traffic is great. But backlinks from a high-quality website can be a great boost to your content’s ranking.

5. Disavow Toxic Backlinks

In recent years, quality backlinks have been growing in value and importance. Every site creator wants to earn high-quality backlinks to their web properties. However, not all links are created equal.

One of the worst things that can happen to your website is a Google penalty.  There are a ton of blog posts out there about what you should do if your site is penalized, but what about preventing a penalty?

Google’s Disavow Tool is one of the helpful tools you can use to prevent your site from being penalized. If you’ve built bad links to your site, or have experienced an influx of toxic links, then using this tool could save your site and business.

But, how can you find those toxic backlinks?

You can identify toxic backlinks by doing a complete backlink audit for your domain using the SEMRush Backlink Analysis tool. As soon as it finishes crawling your backlinks, you can add toxic links to the disavow list after reviewing manually. You can download the disavow file and upload it to Google’s Disavow Tool.

Google Disavow Tool

You should always be careful while preparing your Disavow list, as it may harm your ranking if not done properly. This action should not be done in hurry.

6. Let it Grow

There is no fastest way to increase domain authority.

When a website is created, it starts off with low domain authority. In order to get higher DA (Domain Authority), you need to consistently improve your site SEO and user experience.

The easiest way to think of it, is to consider the readability and the attraction of a website. It’s determined by the links that drive traffic from other websites to your website. The more links your website receives, the more visible it will become to Google.

Time heals everything! And if you are determined enough to grow your site, with the right approach, nothing can stop you.

Final Thoughts

If you’re feeling unlucky when it comes to your site’s ranking and traffic, Domain Authority might be the one thing that will turn things around.

Domain Authority is a simple way of measuring the perceived value of your website. Your Domain Authority can help your rankings on Google, Bing, and other search engines because it’s an indicator that you are a trusted source of information.

People who have high Domain Authority also tend to get more traffic and more strong links from other websites.

If you’re wondering how you increase domain authority, let this post serve as a handy guide.

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