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Gerald Mumpuku
Gerald Mumpuku

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SEO Tip for Web Developers

What Is Domain Authority and How Can I Improve It?

To be a successful brand, you need to rank your site as high up the search engine ranks as possible. Sometimes, the challenge is, you don’t really know how your site is actually doing in search engine results ranking. And even when everything seems ok about your site, it still isn’t ranking high up in search results as you want. In this case, you might want to check out your domain authority (DA) to see how your website is really doing in search engine results.

Let’s dive in and answer the question: What Is Domain Authority and How Can I Improve It?

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority (DA) is a metric created by Moz to determine how likely a domain is to appear in the Search Engine Results Pages. A lot of factors are involved to calculate the Domain authority, including backlinks, referring domains, or search traffic. The difference between domain authority and Page authority is that Domain authority is for entire domain while page authority is for a single page ,that’s the only difference. The factors considered to calculate Page authority as well as domain authority are just the same.

The Domain Authority metric was created to help know how likely a website is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest ranking score.

This metric is based on data from the Link Explorer web index and uses several of factors in its calculations. Domain Authority score predicts a page’s possible ranking, considering several factors; including linking root domains and the number of total links which are found in the link explorer web index into a single DA score. This score will predict the ranking strength of a website over time.

What is a Good Domain Authority Score?

One of the most popular questions about Domain Authority score is, “What is a good Domain Authority score?” Many website owners want to know what a good Domain Authority is to predict the perfect number for ranking in Google search results.

Moz’s Domain Authority scores range from one to 100. One is the lowest score, while 100 is the highest. When you have a greater domain authority score, your site is more likely to have an increase in web traffic and Google search results (SERPs) rankings.

Now let’s get back to our question, what is a good Domain Authority score? The truth is there aren’t specific “good” or “bad” Domain Authority scores, and there is no perfect score because Domain Authority is a comparative metric. Even large sites like google and Facebook don’t have a perfect 100 score.

Having a domain score of 50 may seem “bad,” while a domain score of 90 may seem “good” because of their differences from 100, but it’s not true. The two scores do not indicate a bad or good Domain Authority.

Determine how good Domain Authority your site’s is by measuring it against your competitors or sites of the same niche.

How Can I Improve Domain Authority?

Raising your a site’s Domain Authority is a long-term process, and involves improving several ranking factors. The best way to raise your Domain Authority score is to improve your website’s SEO, and check the quality (Dofollow and Nofollow) and quantity of external links pointing to your website. The Domain Authority score is meant to help know how competitive a site will rank in Google search results (SERPs). There are many tools that can be used to get insight of your domain score, the current number of backlinks, and the number of referring domains.

How Can I Check Domain Authority?
There are a lot of link authority tools that you can use to check your site’s Domain Authority. We recommend using Moz’s free domain SEO analysis tool.

How Do You Check Your Domain Authority?
Moz’s free domain SEO analysis tool will give you the Domain Authority, number of linking root domains, ranking keywords for your site and the percentage of spam of your site as shown in the photo above.

Domain Authority FAQs
How do i increase my Domain Authority?
Improving your website’s SEO and gaining more quality external links pointing to your website will greatly increase domain authority.

How Do I check my domain authority?
Use Moz’s free domain authority checker tool to determine your current domain authority score.

How Do I Build Domain Authority
We now know what Domain Authority means and the how it can affect the likelihood of a domain to appear in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), so, let’s talk about how you can build domain authority.

It is not just about the backlinks or the number of referring domain to your website, but the quality of those backlinks, the ones that are relevant to understand your website content.

To build Domain Authority, here are some strategies to consider:

Quality: Always proritise relevant backlinks, pick the ones that are similar or significant to your site content
Do-Follow backlinks: There many platforms to build backlinks but make sure that all the interesting websites with backlinks are do-follow links.
Quality content: Content is king. Create quality content which will get you a lot of traffic and make visitors link back to your website.

Target Audience: Create content for your target audience, which can be attractive to them, and get more traffic by post sharing.

Update your older content: Always go back to old content to improve the content SEO and and add new information of interest for the user.

Spy on competitors: Study your main competitors, see and think of where they are getting traffic that you not getting. Check where they are getting the backlinks. Now apply the same strategies and backlinks on your website.

Share content: Share your website content to get more traffic to your website. There are many platforms that content can be shared such as social media or forums.

Building your Domain Authority is not an easy task but a long-term strategy — it takes time and results wont show immediately. However, following these practices will help you increase your website visibility on SERPs and consequently increase website traffic.

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