How to increase domain authority on your blog

Increase your domain authority

If you've landed here you're probably thinking what the hell is domain authority? Why is it so important and how can I increase domain authority on my blog? So many questions and if you're new to blogging I'd definitely take your time learning and researching around DA and PA (page authority) and how to increase them. To save you time I've created this definitive guide on how to increase your domain authority. Some of these steps will take you five minutes!

What is domain authority and is it important?

Domain authority is a search engine ranking score created by Moz. It became popular because Google got rid of page rank and many people within the blogging and PR community were looking for another way to 'rank' websites. It ranges from 1 to 100 with the higher the number corresponding to how well you perform within search engines. 

Domain authority uses many different factors to calculate your rank. This includes other sites that link to you, your own linking root domains, keywords you rank for, etc. This is all calculated into one single DA score. Google does not use Domain authority as a metric for search rankings but many brands and PR companies do. DA is often a metric quoted when considering sponsored posts and whether a brand wants to work with you.

Is it important? Yes and no.

DA won't mean a huge deal if your page views are huge and you get continuous traffic. These can still be shown to brands in return for working together. But, as many media contacts and brands ask for your DA rank it's better to build a good one than ignore it completely.

What changed with DA?

On March 5th, 2019 the existing domain authority changed to Moz DA 2.0. This meant that people's DA changed, the metric changed a lot and gave more credence to higher quality links and backlinks. Many bloggers and social media experts disliked the change but it's here to stay. You should work with it and work on how to increase domain authority on your blog with the new metric

First thing's first,  head to the Moz Domain Authority Checker to understand what your DA is right now. Then let's work on how to improve your DA

Content is King

No matter what you do or what guides you read on SEO and how to increase domain authority your content will always be king. Even the best social media marketers and search engine optimisation specialists need good content to keep their audience. Content needs to speak to your audience and compel them to share your post with others. 

You want to make sure your posts are engaging and deliver valuable content to your customers and answers all their questions. Take this post for example, I'm hoping that after you've read this content you'll know everything you need to about increasing your domain authority and have actionable steps to get you there. 

Make sure your post is visually appealing. Either using your own photography or visiting a free stock images website. People love pictures, gifs, infographics, basically any aspect of interactivity you can add to your post and make it shareable will help improve your DA. Share your content across social media to encourage other shares from other people. The sharing aspect of a post helps metrics work out that the content you've written is newsworthy and other people are sharing it, thus, giving it power for the DA metric 

Search Engine Optimisation

Understanding SEO is a huge part of blogging and works hand in hand with increasing domain authority. A strong SEO profile will do wonders for your DA score but it does take a while to get the hang of. I recommend having a read of blogging SEO posts to understand the basics of how this affects your google rankings and a few hints and tricks you can apply straight away

For each blog post you should have an idea of a keyword you want to rank for, ideally a long-tailed keyword (a phrase people might Google) this post for example I'd like to rank for "how to increase domain authority" because this is a phrase people will google, and those people should then find this post helpful.

Once you've identified your keyword make sure it's included in the blog post title, blog permalink, meta description for your images and frequently throughout your post while still keeping the post natural. This should help you rank for that particular word and gain traffic which will have a positive impact on your DA score

Make sure you also keep your blog nice and tidy, run broken link checkers on a weekly basis and delete any that don't load. Track your links back to your blog and disavow any spammy ones via google 

Gaining Backlinks

Despite the change in domain authority metric, one of the biggest ways of increasing your blog domain authority is by gaining links to your website from other relevant and high quality sites. There are many ways of gaining backlinks, but it's important they're from relevant sites as the new DA metric ranks the quality of the backlink and uses this to decide if it should have a positive or negative influence on your score (which is why you should disavow spam links as mentioned previously). 

One way of gaining backlinks to your blog is to guest post on another website, this gives you the opportunity to tap into another audience, share a highly relevant post and direct traffic back to your site. It also has a positive impact on your DA score. Another tactic for doing this is to find a broken link on another website and contacting the administrator if you have a similar link. I've found this can be hit and miss but if the content would be valuable anyway or it's already written then you have nothing to lose

An aspect of backlinks that you're entirely in control over is creating deep links within your own posts. Link back to previous articles or harder to reach links within your newer articles. This will pass link juice to them (increasing your page authority) and also increase viewers duration on your site and reduce bounce rate. The ideal scenario is that any visitor to your blog can click around and still land on another of your articles they find relevant two or three times per visit.

Website Speed

Slow sites are everyone's bugbear right? It's frustrating for everyone and Google dislike it too, they penalise slow sites which will throttle your SEO rankings even if your content is amazing so it's definitely something you need to keep an eye. Check your website page speed this gives you a handy traffic light result for both mobile and desktop versions of your website I'd then head to Neil Patel's site who runs through every aspect of increasing the speed on your site. A faster website means more customers, follower and a reduced bounce rate

Patience

This does not work overnight, while the Moz Domain Authority does now update daily it takes a while for it to crawl all the new data, for Google to index pages etc. so be patient! Keep working through your blog updating your posts and working on your SEO and your domain authority will catch up.

What are your top tips for increasing domain authority?