How to Improve Your Website’s Domain Authority

28/11/2016 // Domaining // Rene Anthony

When it comes to building the prominence of your website, Domain Authority is one of the most critical components. For those unfamiliar with the criteria, Domain Authority is a metric (a score out of 100) which is used amongst web gurus and domainers to gauge traffic flow and ranking in Google searches – relative to other websites.

The metric is formulated from a number of different components – the most prolific of these is backlinks, however others include content quality, loading times, web traffic and domain age. Backlinks are the number and quality of links that point towards your site from other sources.

Although you can’t directly change the Domain Authority of your website, certain actions can help to improve it. And considering that the overwhelming majority of websites have a score of 0, you stand to gain exponentially if you can make your domain stand out from the crowd.

First and foremost, optimising your backlinks is a vital step to boost your domain authority. What many website operators or business owners don’t realise is that you specifically need to have backlinks from high quality sources. Sources who themselves have a high domain authority. On the contrary, if you end up with links from poor quality sources, that is only going to weigh your website’s score down.

What some people choose to do is engage in collaborative partnerships with other websites, offering blog postings or related services to their viewers in exchange for a backlink that will also likely help generate additional traffic flow.

Alternatively, some elect to employ a content marketing strategy. There is no substitute for writing ‘quality’ content. After all, as more people visit the site to view it, or experience engagements with it (like it, share it), you will naturally start to contribute towards boosting your domain authority. Alternatively, some will design a secondary website with high value content for the purpose of linking it to their other one – in effect, one ‘piggybacks’ off the other.

Optimising internal links will also play a role in improving your domain authority. This is because of the SEO implications. Make sure you are engaging in correct SEO practices. Be sure to mix up the anchor texts which are used as the basis of your links. Optimise tags and coding. Utilise the right keywords. Respect word counts. Don’t go overboard with the internal links and neglect external backlinks.

Regardless of how you link to your content, it helps to utilise social media to maximise your reach. Promoting your quality content through social media channels will help drive web traffic, while the more engagement you can encourage, the better your prospects of improving your score.

Lastly, ensure the site is efficient for the end user. Keep loading times as short as possible, which may mean cutting back on the unnecessary visuals and ads. Ensure that mobile users are not neglected from consideration either. If you do neglect the mobile design of your site, you may find users’ frustration is reflected in bouncing traffic, which will inhibit your domain authority.

That’s it for this occasion, stay tuned for our next educational article. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Best wishes,
The Netfleet Team

http://www.netfleet.com.au