Knowing the domain authority of a website is important because it helps businesses and web developers predict how well a website will rank on search engines. This blog will give you an overview of what exactly domain authority means and what you can do to improve your DA score.

What is Domain Authority?

The Domain Authority metric was developed by Moz, an SEO company, as a way to check your chances of ranking higher in search engine result pages (SERPS). As the name suggests, the domain authority is a rating from 0 to 100 that indicates the authority of your website. Here’s are some key points you need to know about the domain authority:

• The Google search algorithm does not take into account the DA score when ranking a website. Google uses PageRank instead.
• The process to increase your domain authority score takes a lot of time and very often the results are quite slow.
• Since the DA score uses a logarithmic scale, you will find that it is easier to improve your DA score from 20 to 30 but difficult to go from 70 to 80.
• Your DA score should not be used to evaluate your SEO performance but it should be seen as a website metric for domain comparison purposes.
• Google penalties are not taken into account when calculating domain authority. Hence a website could have a high DA score while the domain is under a penalty.

The most important thing to remember about DA is that it is very good at helping you understand the relative competitiveness of your website. Once you know your domain authority you can implement smart SEO tactics to match and eventually outrank the competition. 

How is the domain authority calculated?

According to Moz, the company that developed the metic, the Domain Authority score is calculated by taking into account a more than 4 signals including:

• A number of incoming links that point to your website.
• Quality and Relevancy of incoming links
• Content quality and relevance of your website pages
• The website’s SEO performance in general
• Social Signals such as the popularity of your domain in social media networks.

These are just some of the factors that are used to calculate the DA score of a website. If you want to learn the domain authority of your website you can go to the Moz open site explorer and simply type in your domain.

Top 5 Steps to Increase Your Website Domain Authority

There are a number of ways you can improve the link profile, such as obtaining incoming links from high authority websites, reducing the number of low-quality links, and so on. Another way for you to improve your link profile is to reach out to other webmasters or content writers and collaborate with them to increase your chances of linking your website through their articles.

On-page SEO optimization can be done through the proper use of headings and titles within your content. You should also make sure you use keywords naturally in your content to improve your on-page SEO. Optimized titles and descriptions, along with the SEO optimization of your images and videos will also help to boost your domain authority score in the long run. In the end, the quality of the content is the biggest ranking factor when it comes to On-page SEO.

Mobile-friendliness is a significant ranking factor in Google, and by extension for domain authority as well. The fact that Google is actively working on a mobile-first index should be motivation enough for you to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Digital marketing and SEO experts have said that having a website that is not responsive has a negative impact on your overall Domain Authority Score.

Now that is a very small window, but it is also a window of opportunity you need to improve your page speed and increase the domain authority. There a couple of changes you can make to increase the loading speed of your website and make the user experience better. For starters, you should remove unnecessary plugins, optimize the file size of images, and upgrade to a more powerful server.

You can improve your social signals by updating your Facebook business page and increasing the number of followers you have on your social media accounts. You should also ensure the social media buttons on your content are active so that users can share your website quite easily.

Conclusion

Since domain authority is not a ranking factor for Google, you should not really be worried about the exact score you have. The most important use of the domain authority is to give you an idea about how you compare with your completion and how likely you are to increase your ranking. The domain authority is only meant to help you build a better website that will get you a solid ranking over time.