When you spend a lot of time and energy to put together a WordPress website, you naturally want people to visit it. Otherwise, what’s the point?
In order to get views, you probably already know a bit about Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the technique used by online marketers to ensure that a website will be in the top search engine results for certain keywords related to a business or blog.
But while Google and other search engines may try to hold back on revealing everything about their ranking algorithms, there is a way to predict your search engine score—Domain Authority.
Let’s take a look at just how you can put this tool to use for your website.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a ranking system developed by Moz that helps website owners gauge how well they are doing with their SEO. Ultimately, a high domain authority score will tell you how well your site will rank with a search engine. The scores range from 1 to 100—the higher the score, the better off your site is.
Domain authority is calculated using several different factors including the number of high-quality external links that are directing traffic to your website. Besides thinking about the ranking as a means of judging SEO, you can think of it as a comparison snapshot to how well you are doing versus other websites in the same category (i.e., your competition). If you compare your score to their score, you can get a feel for who will come out higher on the search engine results.
How To Check Your Score
There are several different domain authority checkers on the Internet. The most obvious one is Moz’s own open site explorer that allows you to type in a web address and receive the page’s score. Those using a Google Chrome or Firefox web browser can also install a browser extension from Moz that will automatically check both the domain authority and page authority of a website.
What Creates a Good Domain Authority Score?
Two factors to be familiar with are MozRank and MozTrust.
MozRank looks at your website’s link profile. It will determine how many external links direct visitors to your site and if those referring sites are of high quality. A top-flight website with millions of visitors like Wikipedia will score incredibly high in this regard whereas a local business may score fairly low here.
MozTrust looks at how close you are to a website that is considered “trusted.” For instance, if you have external links coming from a government website or a highly trusted business site, then your MozTrust score will be high. However, if a site’s only links come from suspicious sites like those tagged for malware violations, then your score will be low.
Can You Raise Your Domain Authority Score?
There are a few things that you can do to improve your score. The most obvious one should be to get more sites to link to your site. Try to make sure that the sites that link to you are trusted. Some people will try to buy links but those sites are usually so untrustworthy that they wind up lowering the domain authority instead of raising it.
If you can spread out your links over a large number of sites, especially from various regions, you will also help yourself as will linking your blogs and content pieces to other blogs that you have written. (This is called internal linking.)
Finally, the best advice that you can take is that you should become an authority figure in your particular field. The more people trust you as a source, the more they will link to you, thus increasing your score.
If a website is created and no one visits it, then it may as well not exist at all. By working to create links to your own site, you can improve your website’s domain rating which will, in turn, improve your chances of being visited by more readers and customers.
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