If a new user visited your website today, would they consider you a thought leader in your area of expertise? The answer to this question may indicate your Domain Authority. Developed by Seattle-based SEO company Moz, Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs) and refers to your website’s reputation as a thought leader. Ranging from 1 to 100, the score is calculated by evaluating various factors, including unique backlinks and social signals. Unlike Page Authority, which gauges the strength of individual web pages, Domain Authority evaluates the predictive ranking strength of entire domains or subdomains. As to influencing your Domain Authority, Moz advises improving one’s “overall SEO.” With that piece of advice in mind, here’s how to increase Domain Authority in seven actionable steps.
1. Create High-Quality, Linkable Content
In order to be considered a “thought leader” and build a robust catalog of high-quality backlinks, you must create high-quality content that is optimized for the search engines. And you must create it regularly. The more user-friendly and informative, the more linkable your content will be. Other factors that increase the quality of your content include having a blog and updating it often, creating videos and infographics, offering resources and tutorials, and improving your overall design.
2. Build High-Quality Backlinks the Right Way
Once you create high-quality content that anticipates your users’ questions and provides clear answers, links should naturally follow. But Moz outlines a few ways you might build links without resorting to purchasing them or building spammy link profiles, which may end up doing more harm than good with Google penalties. These link building practices include writing up testimonials on partner sites and getting involved in your local community to build brand awareness.
3. Expand Your Internal Linking Strategy
Don’t let your focus on earning backlinks overshadow your need to have a solid internal linking strategy. By populating your content with internal links, you help your visitors find exactly what they’re looking for, making your site all the more user-friendly. Internal links also make it easier for search engines to index your site and are a crucial step in learning how to increase page authority. One way you might add internal links to your site, besides using descriptive anchor text, is suggesting related blog posts or tutorials based on what the user is currently reading on your site.
4. Track Your Page Authority
Tracking the page authority of your web pages can help you figure out if certain inbound marketing strategies are working or not. A page with low authority needs a better link profile, which can be influenced by getting external links from other high-authority pages, which act as “votes of confidence” for the authority of your page. By comparing a page with low authority and a page with high authority, you can easily pinpoint flaws and either mend them or avoid them in the future when working on your inbound linking strategy. By using a tool like Moz Open Site Explorer, you can track Page Authority and Domain Authority all in one place.
5. Remove Bad Links
Having more links doesn’t necessarily mean your Domain Authority will go up if the links are bad ones. According to Moz, a good link should come from an internally well-linked page on a site and if the difference between the Domain Authority and Page Authority is quite high, it can be an indication of spam. Gathering backlink data will help you see if there are dead links or spammy links that may be hurting your site. You can then work on disavowing the links by reaching out to Google.
6. Promote Content on Social Media
Since social signals are a determining factor in your Domain Authority, you will need to work on your social media strategy. Aside from adding social share buttons to your site, you should post links to your content on your social media pages and encourage your followers to like and share. Being active on social media is also another way to establish yourself as a thought leader.
7. Migrate to HTTPS and Keep Domain Authority
Migrating your site from HTTP to HTTPS will improve security on your site and your SEO power because Google rewards sites for implementing encryption. However, if you already have established high-quality backlinks and Domain Authority, you should be wary of sacrificing your hard work with a website migration. Luckily, using a service like EasyRedir allows you to manage URL redirects while preserving link equity, Domain Authority, and Page Authority. You can also use EasyRedir to analyze your links, gathering information about the location, device, referrer and pages requested by your visitors.
Learn more about how EasyRedir can help you increase your domain authority.
