Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking metric created by Moz, a software service (SaaS) company based in Seattle, which predicts how well a site will perform online. DA is measured on a scale of 1 to 100 — the closer you are to 100, the higher your ranking chances in search engine result pages ( SERPs) and the more clicks you receive.
What’s your site’s DA?
Moz has a free Link Explorer application, which can be used to test the DA of your site.
Head over to https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home. You’ll see a page with a search bar in the middle:
Type your website URL in the search bar and click “Analyze.” You’ll see a results page with a description of your DA:
We would say that most DAs are broadly speaking floating about the range of 30-50 However, don’t be discouraged if your DA is smaller than that.
With this nine-step plan, you will most definitely improve your DA score.
1. Age your domain name.
They say that age comes with experience — and that is particularly true when it comes to your domain name. Older domain names are considered more legitimate and have a slightly higher DA score than younger domain names. It means that every time you change your domain, it’s like knocking down the credibility you’ve built up over the years and starting from scratch. That’s why it’s important to pick an easy-to-remember domain name that’s relevant to your niche and keep it for a very long time.
2. Optimize your On-Page.
The next step to improve your DA is to optimize all of your on-page code, content, website structure, meta tags, and other on-page elements (such as H1, title tags, image alt tag and website architecture) to be search engine friendly.
3. Create high-quality content.
To attract high-quality links from multiple domains in your niche, you absolutely have to create awesome content that appeals to your target audience. Doing so will definitely improve your DA score (and give you a ton of additional SEO benefits).
4. Improve your internal linking structure.
You must not be so overly concerned with earning external links that you lose sight of linking internally. Internal links help nudge visitors to what they are trying to find on your website, thus enriching their user experience and taking your DA score up.
5. Clean up your link profile.
If you want a great DA score, you’re going to have to find a way to keep your link profile clean. And to do that, you need to remove the bad links from your profile. This process entails using a tool like Moz Explorer, Ahrefs Backlink Checker or SEMrush Backlink Audit Tool to figure out any inappropriate or unwanted links.
Once you have performed your link audit, you can contact the website owners and ask them to either delete the link or add the “nofollow tag” to devalue the link. If this doesn’t work, you can use the Google Disavow tool to remove links from your profile.
6.Create your authority in your niche.
Becoming an authority figure in your niche allows you to position yourself as an expert on a specific matter by gaining readers’ confidence and supplying the community with expert advice. This can only be accomplished by producing interesting and insightful content (perhaps you can make guest blogs on forums that are related to your industry) and engaging your target audience on social media in a meaningful way.
By reinforcing your public image as an expert, you will be able to enhance your brand image. This will not only help drive a ton of traffic to your site, but will also increase the number of external links you receive from other high-quality domains in your niche. This, of course, translates into a higher DA score.
7.Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Mobile isn’t just the way of the future. It’s the way of the now. Research shows mobile users outpaced desktop as of 2014. That was six years ago!
This means that if your website has not yet been designed for mobile use, it will not only affect your search rankings (Google prefers mobile-friendly websites), but you will also miss out on a significant number of visitors.
In order to get started, you can take advantage of Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and run the test for your domain. Google will give you a nice report of how mobile-friendly your site is and what you can do to improve it.
8.Improve your page speed
If you don’t have a website that loads fast, people will bounce faster than you can say “Don’t Go!” After all, most users have very little patience, and if the website takes forever to load, their patience will wear out and they will end up abandoning the website.
To diagnose what is causing your website to run slower than it should, you can run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Not only will Google’s PageSpeed Insights analyze the speed of your site, it will identify some ways for you to make your site faster and improve your search engine rankings.
9.Increase your social signals.
While Google has confirmed officially that social signals do not form part of its ranking algorithm, there is a strong connection between websites that rank high on Google search results and their social signals. What we want to say is that Google-populated websites are more likely to have tons of comments, shares and tweets.
In view of the fact that social signals are a big ranking factor, you would need to post your content on your various social media pages to get those signals. Otherwise, the content, no matter how fine, will just sit by itself on your web.