Here’s a simple guide that encompasses 21 surefire ways to increase the DA of a website.
DA stands for Domain Authority.
It is one of the metrics that you can use to improve the rank of one’s website among other SEO components.
When it comes to showing up more for related queries in search result pages of Google and other search engines, DA is critical in dictating your potential in ranking.
Within the result pages of search engines, DA has been proven to play a vital role.
It’s a metric that ranks websites ranges from 0 to 100. The greater the number, the higher the score and the greater your website’s authority.
It is one vital metric that can be used to predict how likely a website post is to rank based on factors that determine its DA score.
These factors include linking root domains and the total number of links the website has on other websites aggregated into a DA score.
Moz develops this metric to serve as a road map for web admins.
Google, however, doesn’t use it and directly determines what shows on the SERPs (but the likeliness).
As mentioned above, DA scores can be used as a roadmap to help achieve better SEO potentials.
Although not used directly by Google, research has shown a strong correlation between high domain authority and better rankings.
For that reason, you should strive to achieve high domain authority scores.
Brands also use DA scores as metric for measuring the ROI of collaborating with bloggers on a sponsored post.
Here are 21 ways to improve your website’s domain authority (DA) score:
Table of Contents
1. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
In the third quarter of 2020, the Statista report showed that mobile traffic represents about 50.81 of Internet traffic.
These, surprisingly, leave out tablets.
If anyone could look close into this, the chances are that they would see it as a necessity not to disregard mobile device users.
For rough estimation, half of your site traffic may be coming from mobile users.
For this reason, search engines are paying attention to sites that mobile users will be comfortable reading on and rank these sites better than those that are not mobile-friendly.
Plus, having a non-mobile responsive site will come at the detriment of your domain authority score.
Therefore, you may want to conduct a mobile-friendly test for your website that can be done within seconds using the Google Mobile-Friendly test tool.
If the result indicates you have a mobile-friendly website, congratulations, and if otherwise, you will need to employ a solution.
A great way to turn your website mobile-friendly is by using a responsive theme or cascading style sheets (CSS).
2. Optimize Website Loading Speed
The speed at which the pages load on your website is one significant SEO factor.
Your content may be good and everything okay, but with the poor web loading speed, many of your audience leaves your site for competition.
An aggregate of this results in an increased bounce rate of your site.
Beyond an average bounce rate is a strong signal that tells search engines to stop recommending your site as often as they should.
Having a website loading speed is essential to let your audience scroll through your pages without losing interest.
There are several free tools available that can help check the speed of your website.
A good tool for this task is the Google Page Speed Insights.
To employ a fix, you may want to leverage caching plugins, lazy loading, getting read of unused plugins, and more.
3. Obtain Links From High Authority Sites
Getting links from any site would equal a backlink, but here comes the difference regarding relevance.
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When you get backlinks from high domain authority sites, it boosts your DA score more than when you get backlinks from a low DA site.
This means that getting backlinks from a site with a DA of 90 would fetch you greater authority than getting the same amount of backlinks from a less authoritative site.
4. Focus On Traffic-Driving Backlinks
While you want to leverage link building to improve your site’s authority, it is essential to make sure that link juices pass to your site and an inflow of traffic.
Hence, building your backlinks on sites that will pass you traffic is critical when it comes to promoting your DA score.
5. Create Backlink-Worthy Content
In the words of content marketers: Content is king.
To increase the DA of the website, you can make your content work to make it valuable and exciting.
This way, many would find interest in your content and would like to reference your work or share it, giving you additional backlinks through those references.
6. Take Advantage of Internal Links
You may be after links from external sites, but a great thing you may miss is using your site to raise your DA score.
Using internal links would help, including adding links to your other blog posts relevant to your content.
Usually, you help the audience locate another resource from your blog or navigate from one part of your site to another.
Still, with its massive potential in increasing your DA score, you have more reasons to play with internal links.
7. Get Links from Relevant Sites
Earlier, we discussed getting backlinks from authoritative sites.
Well, that is it, but you also want to make sure the links you are getting are from websites whose niche is related to yours.
These links tend to carry more weight than those from general or unrelated websites.
For example, if you have a food blog, getting a backlink from a higher authority food magazine website will be more beneficial to you than getting one from a sports car website.
8. Run from Sites With High Spam Score
Although you may want to build links from high domain authority sites that are higher than yours, it is crucial also to be wary of their spam scores.
If a website is overly spammy, you may end up losing your domain authority rather than getting some.
For your already built backlinks, you can perform a backlink analysis and disavow those links from sites with high spam scores or approach those site administrators to help take down your links.
9. Consider Guest Blogging
One of the best and most practiced ways to increase the DA of a website is by guest blogging.
What you should do here is to perform an analysis on high domain authority, high traffic, and low spam score blogs that are in the same niche as yours.
You can offer to write an article for their site to return a link to your site.
Many would turn down your guest blogging offers for one reason or the other, but some would accept your content, provided it meets their guest posting requirements.
10. Link Building from Link Rots
Link rots mean broken links, and it can turn out to be at your advantage in this scenario.
Although many websites work hard to get rid of broken links, they sometimes fail to fix some.
You can be strategic in gaining backlinks to your website by performing an audit of a website from which you may want to get a link.
You can also approach the site administrators and highlight the broken link while offering them your link to substitute for that broken one.
This way, you will help the site in view while gaining backlinks to your website in return, without writing a guest blog.
11. Take Advantage of Brand Mentions
A few other blogs may discuss your site in their content but do not associate these mentions with a link to your site.
You can leverage brand-mentioned auditing tools to learn about those sites, and SemRush is a perfect example.
When you do and get some that mention your brand or site without adding your links, you should ask them to add your link to the anchor text.
12. Regain Lost Backlinks
Some of the backlinks you have built may get lost with time, while the articles are still intact.
If the lost Backlink is from an authoritative site that you can’t afford to lose, you can approach the site administrators and highlight your lost link so you can claim it once again.
13. Tap Into Social Media
While social media could serve as a traffic source for your site, it is also an avenue to increase the outreach of a post.
Social media can return more outstanding social shares to different places, which can help gain backlinks to your website.
14. Perform Link Audit
As you make these efforts to increase your DA score, it is essential that you also perform a link check now and then.
In doing so, you have data for the domains pointing to your site.
If the data negatively affects the site, you may need to remove or disavow while you head on to gaining backlinks to your website that are high quality.
15. Build Links Steadily
As much as you may want to increase the stand of your site in SERPs, you don’t want to rush things up.
Rushing things here means building so many backlinks within the space of few days.
You don’t want to be building tens of backlinks a day from the start and end up giving search engines the impression that your site is getting them through unnatural means.
16. Focus on Quality, not Quantity
Quality always beats quantity in all aspects, and it works as well when it comes to building links that point to your site.
Instead of gaining backlinks to your website that are of low quality, you should address that energy into adding value and getting those links from high-quality places.
17. Focus on User-Experience
From ranking factors to search engine algorithms, all oriented towards improving user experiences.
It is, therefore, crucial to play along by also putting the user experience first.
Such an action helps you to realize a massive organic outreach, which will, in return, bring about a more excellent DA score.
18. Be Consistent
The maximum value of the Moz DA grading factor is 100.
Nonetheless, it takes forever to attain this score.
You need to keep pushing for greater authority and remember that your competitors aren’t sleeping either, so it is a continuous struggle.
Consistently working on your DA score over time will help you achieve better results.
19. Website Security Matters
While the security of your website won’t directly matter for your DA score, it is an excellent factor that dictates your ranking on Google.
Install an SSL certificate on your website, and a firewall will be helpful as well.
A hacked site may be hard to recover in terms of ranking.
However, prioritizing your site’s security goes a long way in keeping things intact, contributing to other factors that in turn contribute to its DA score.
20. Claim Links from Improper Attribution
Your excellent content will serve as a powerful reference for other high-domain authority sites.
You deserve all the credits in the world for your excellent content.
However, some sites may not give the proper credits or attribution.
For the copyright you own for the content, whether in the form of video, audio, or text, you can claim proper backlink credits to your site from the user.
21. Take Advantage of Images
You can offer images that are free from royalties but with the condition that you, as a source, are being given the proper credits for your work.
Although your images must be attractive and helpful to merit consideration from other people, some types of images attract the most interest, and they are:
- Infographics
- Photos
- Maps
- Photos of products
- Maps
- Graphs etc.
Final Thoughts
While some of the highlighted tips may not result in an immediate improvement in your DA score, they can result in its increase indirectly and in the long run.
Increasing your DA score requires patience and hard work, but with the right strategy in place, outpacing your competitors is something attainable.
So, feel free to bookmark this page as a resource to help improve your strategy in finding success through SEO.
What other means or strategies are you using to increase the DA of the website?
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