DOMAIN NAME AUTHORITY SCORE

There are hundreds of ever-changing factors that Google uses to establish search engine ranking for a website. One VIP method is a websites Domain Authority.

Domain authority, a metric developed by Moz basically states that the higher your domain authority is, the more likely you will have a higher search engine ranking and more qualified web traffic.

Your domain authority is also a good way to measure SEO efforts and web strength as compared to your competitors.

Domain Authority vs Page Authority

Before I discuss how domain authority is factored and how to improve domain authority, it’s important to differentiate it from page authority.

Page authority is a comparable metric, but rather than measuring the strength of an entire domain or subdomain, page authority measures the ranking strength of a single web page.

How Does Moz Calculate Domain Authority?

Domain authority is ranked on a score scale of 1 – 100 (1 being the poorest, 100 being the highest).

One note, it is much easier to improve a domain authority rank of 30 than if it was at a 70 or an 80. It can also be difficult to improve a score under 30 without sustained and considerable effort.

Moz uses over 40 unique factors to determine score. The following are the most important:

1. Linking Root Domains: the number of unique backlinks your website has earned.
2. MozRank: MozRank is the metric used to score the strength of your website’s external links. It considers the number of links and the quality of those links. Quality beats quantity.
3. MozTrust: Similar to MozRank, MozTrust is a metric used to help determine the quality of your external links. It measures how closely your website is connected to trusted websites, such as.edu or .gov sites.
4. Quality Content: Content is one of most VIP factors in search engine ranking.
5. Social Signals: Google uses social signals as one of the main factors in identifying good quality content. It is safe to assume that a piece of content that is shared, liked and commented on many times has some quality. Moz uses the same social signals in determining domain authority.
6. Search Engine Friendliness: This looks at the overall SEO, site structure and user-friendliness of a website. Poor site structure makes your site difficult to navigate and difficult for search engines to properly crawl and index your site. This is essential for your domain authority as well.

Moz uses a similar scale as domain authority to score page authority, meaning a 100-point, logarithmic scale. Keep in mind that even if you haven’t done anything to a page, its score may still fluctuate due to the fact that Moz is constantly updating their algorithm. The following are some of the ranking factors that Moz uses to determine page authority:

1. Social signals, such as the number of Google+1’s, Facebook Likes, Twitter Retweets or LinkedIn Shares a page has received.
2. The number of root domains linking to the page.
3. The number of root domains linking to the page using partial match anchor text.
4. The number of subdomains that link to the page.
5. The number of quality websites linking to the page.
6. The number of external links a page has.

The following are the 9 actions that you should adhere to in order to your increase domain authority.

1. Choose a good domain name: If you are just starting out, then pick a domain name that is relevant to your website. It should be something that is relatively easy to remember so that visitors won’t have any issues returning to your site because they forgot your domain name.
2. Optimize your on-page content: SEO matters for both Google search engine ranking as well as your domain authority, so make sure that you optimize all on-page code, including your title tags, image alt tags, and the content itself. Additionally, include variations of your main keywords, keep all of your permalinks short and relevant, and create a sidebar section for new posts.
3. Build domain authority with content relevance: Another best SEO practice is to also boost your content and keyword relevance. This can be done by creating long-form, in-depth content that covers a wide breadth of the content.
4. Create linkable content: To acquire high-quality links from multiple domains, which both MozRank and MozTrust use as important factors, create high-quality content that is published regularly. The better your content is, the more likely it will be that another authoritative site will link to it. Your content has to be relevant to your brand and to your audience, informative, creative, and well written.
5. Improve internal linking: Internal links help to direct visitors to relevant content improving customer experience (cx). Internal links help prevent visitor bounce rates. Additionally, internal links make it easier for search engines to index your entire website.
6. Mobile-friendly: A immense number of online users access the web through their mobile smart devices. If your website has not been optimized for mobile, then you are way behind. Not only will it hurt your mobile search engine rankings, but you will lose out on a lot of visitors who will simply leave your site once they realize that it’s not being properly displayed on their device. To check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, you can visit this Mobile-Friendly Test by Google Developers page. It will analyze your web page and let you know how mobile-friendly your site is.
7. Become an Authority in your niche: This can only be done by creating great content and engaging with your followers and consumers on social media in a meaningful manner. By boosting your reputation as an authority, you’ll strengthen brand identity which will not only increase quality traffic but also increase the number of backlinks from other high-quality sources.
8. Increase page loading speed: Poor page loading speed will increase bounce rate.
9. Promote content via your social channels: Social signals are a VIP ranking factor and brands need to promote content on social channels such as Facebook and Instagram to acquire those signals. Promote your content on your various social media pages and make sure to encourage followers to like, share, or comment on it. You should also include social share buttons directly on webpages.