It doesn’t do any good to build a website if no one comes to see it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for ensuring your website shows up high in search engine rankings.
The better the SEO of your website is, the higher up it will appear in the listing when people do a search relevant to your industry. But how do you know if your SEO is up to par to have a high ranking? The answer lies in understanding your domain authority score.
Domain authority (DA) was developed by Moz as a ranking system to help website owners know what their score is, so they can make improvements where needed.
Most search engines don’t disclose all of their algorithms used to determine website rankings, so checking your domain authority periodically can help tremendously.
Why Domain Authority Is Important
When checking your domain authority score, you’ll see a range of numbers from 1 to 100. You want your website to be as close to 100 as possible so it will show up higher in search engine results.
You can check your score by visiting the Moz site explorer, but there are also other free checkers online you can use. The good thing about these checkers is you can view the score of any other website on the internet.
Find a competitor website and check your score against theirs to see how you match up and make adjustments to your website as needed.
What Goes Into A Domain Authority Score?
Without knowing exactly what goes into a domain authority score, you won’t know what improvements you need to make.
In general, the DA ranking of a website is determined by the MozRank and MozTrust:
- MozRank – this factor looks closely at the link profile of your website. The more credible websites that include links to your website, the higher your MozRank will be. The key factor here is high-quality links. A credible website with millions of unique views and visitors that links to your website will help you receive a higher score than if your website is linked by a small local business site.
- MozTrust – this factor examines to what extent your website is considered to be trusted. The more external links you have from other trusted websites, the more trusted your website will be. If you have a lot of external links from non-credible websites or sites with malware violations, then your MozTrust score will suffer as a result.
As you can see, the more your website becomes a credible source for a large number of people, the higher your DA ranking will be.
You’ll likely need to make some tweaks along the way and constantly monitor your domain authority score, but it’s well worth the effort when you keep visitors coming to your website.
Audit Your Links For A Better DA Ranking
There are plenty of strategies business owners use to get other websites to link to their WordPress website.
However, you have to be careful with how you get them since your DA ranking could suffer if Google determines your strategy is classified as a “scheme.” Some of the common strategies that lead to your website getting penalized include:
- Too many link exchanges where you ask for a website owner to link to your website, and you will return the favor
- Exchanging posts containing links, sending a free product in exchange for a link, exchanging money for links, etc.
- Creating links to your website through automated programs
- Hidden or low-quality links that have been embedded in widgets
- Links that are embedded in a signature block and used for posting on forums
If you’ve used any of these strategies to try boosting your DA ranking, you may be causing more harm than good.
Performing routine link audits can help you determine which links are problematic so you can remove them. Link audit tools are available online for your use to help you narrow them down so you can have a clean website.
Tips For Boosting Domain Authority
So what can you do to boost your domain authority score legitimately and organically? It’s important to understand you won’t see instant results when building your DA ranking.
It’s a process that takes time, but you also have to be taking action while you wait for your ranking to improve. Some of those actions you can take to boost your DA ranking include:
- Creating high-quality content – since your DA ranking depends on the number of links to your website from external websites, you need to create high-quality content that websites will want to link to. This could be video content, infographics, informative blogs or any other types of useful content for people.
- Backlinking – external links are talked about a lot, but you also want to be sure to include backlinks on your website as well. Linking to another page within your website helps search engines crawl your website and also provides a way for readers to get the information they need without having to leave your website.
- Improving SEO – take a close look at all pieces of content on your website to ensure keywords, header tags, meta tags, alt tags and the overall site structure is easy to navigate. SEO is critically important to a DA ranking so improving it can improve your overall score.
- Strengthening social media presence – social media platforms can help drive visitors to your website and boost your DA score. Share your content on different platforms so it can be shared and clicked on to boost your score.
It’s easy to get bogged down in all of the details that go into a domain authority score. Sometimes you have to take a step back with your WordPress website and look at the overall site performance. This is where InMotion Hosting enters the picture. We can help ensure your website runs smoothly at all times by offering a hosting solution that fits your needs. When you’re looking to improve your website in all aspects, contact us to see how we can help.