How can I increase the Domain Authority of my website? Or how to rank my website on the number 1 spot on Google? - those are one of the most common questions in discussions with website owners. In this article, I’ll show you what domain authority is, how important it is for the ranking website, and finally, how you can increase it.
Table of Contents
- What is Domain Authority?
- How can I check my domain Authority? - How can I increase my domain authority?
- Build External Links
- Remove bad and toxic links
- Optimize On-page and Technical SEO - Conclusion
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority (DA) is a ranking metric (based on a 1-100 ranking scale) that used to predict how well your website ranks on search engines. If your website has a high score, it means it has more chance of performing well on SERPs (Search Engine Page Results). So, we can say that it is a success indicator.
How can I check my domain Authority?
Here are the best free domain authority checker websites:
How can I increase my Domain Authority?
Many factors go into calculating domain authority. However, there are some tactics for improving the factors that drive DA. Here are the four tactics that will help you increase your site’s DA in a short time. Here is an overview:
1. Link Building
Link building is a marketing effort to get links from other websites to your website. We can say that links are the most important ranking factors used by Google and other search engines. So, what it means is that if you want to rank in search, you have to build links. Those links are also called backlinks or inbound links. You might think “how can I build links? And who would like to give a link to my website?” Do not worry. We have some proven tips for you. However, firstly you should know some key points before building links. Because not all links are created in the same way - here’s a summary:
Now, let’s move on to the best link-building practices:
Blogging
Blogging is a powerful way to promote your website and get many visitors. If you write relevant, useful and well-structured content, you can be sure that it will generate conversations across the web and earn listings. Most importantly backlinks from other blogs/websites. That’s one great way how you get great backlinks.
Broken link building
Broken links are the links that are no longer working. Websites sometimes might have broken links due to several reasons. So basically, you offer them your help to fix their broken link problem, and in return ask them to give a backlink to your website. Broken link-building involves three simple steps:
1. Search for a relevant broken link on a website. To find broken links on any page you can use the Check My Links Chrome extension.
2. Create something similar to the broken resource.
3. Reach out to the website owner and tell them about the broken links on their website and offer them a better replacement that you created.
Get free 15 Email Outreach Templates for Broken Link Building
Guest Posting
Guest blogging is one of the oldest and widely use link building tactic, whereby you write an article for another website in your niche. In the article, you link back to your website. Do you wonder how you can find a website that will accept to publish your article? Then, head on to Google and search one of the following combinations:
- topic + intitle:"write for us"
- topic + intitle:" guest post "
- topic + intitle:" become a author "
HARO is another fine website that links bloggers and journalists to expert sources. You can register yourself as a source, and you will get a link to your website when they use your source.
Infographics
Infographics are a combination of visuals and text. Normally, infographics are visually appealing and contain interesting information about a certain topic that captures readers attention easily. Good infographics also can make your content go viral, generate tons of backlinks, and increase your Domain Authority. That’s the power of creating visual assets. However, creating just infographics is not enough. Like any piece of content that you publish, you also need to promote your infographics.
As an alternative to infographics, you also can try to create other kinds of contents in different formats such as webinar recordings, guides, videos, transcripts, etc.
Competitor Backlink Analysis
If you check the backlinks of your competitors, you will most likely notice that they have some backlinks in common that you do not have yet. You can check your competitors` backlink by using Ahrefs Backlink Checker. If your competitors managed to get these common backlinks, why shouldn’t you too?
2. Remove Bad and Toxic Links
Although, inbound links (links in other websites that pointing your websites) are vital for your website’s DA and rankings. Having bad or spammy inbound links can decrease your ranking. That is why you should find those bad or toxic backlinks and clean them. You might ask “How can I find those links and clean them?”. You can use Ahrefs Guideline to identify those bad links. After that you will have 2 options:
Option # 1: Contacting the Site Owner
Get in touch with the webmasters of these sites and ask them to remove those links. If you do not get any response from them, continue with the second option.
Option # 2: Invalidating backlinks through Google
Google gives website owners a choice to disavow certain backlinks through the Search Console. For that, you just have to create and upload a list of the relevant backlinks to the disavow links tool in a TXT file format. Thus, Google’s crawler will not take into account a list of uploaded bad or spammy backlinks during the indexing process.
3.Optimize On-page and Technical SEO
In this step, you have to ensure all the on-page and technical SEO errors are fixed. A website without errors is as crucial as building backlinks from high Domain Authority websites. Optimizing your on-page content and technical SEO will help you to give better structure to your website and increase user experience, which also helps your website to be crawled easily by search engines. To do Site Audit and be sure that all the on-page and technical SEO errors are fixed, you can use free SEO tools such as Screaming Frog. If you want to learn more about on-page and technical SEO, use a complete guide to on-page SEO and Technical SEO.
Conclusion
Since many factors contribute to ranking, Domain Authority might be complicated. Nevertheless, it is worth to work on it. Another important point is that it takes time to increase the domain authority, as it won’t happen overnight. So look at it as a long-term strategy and use the tactics just explained to increase your DA.
Bonus Tip
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