A comprehensive database for everything WordPress related.

TOP
WPKlik Logo Newsletter

Sign up and receive a free copy of How to Create an online Store with WooCommerce (full guide)

How to Increase Domain Authority of Your WordPress Website

How to Increase Domain Authority of Your WordPress Website

Every website administrator or owner knows the importance of ranking high on search engine results pages (SERP). The higher up you show up in people’s searches, the more traffic you’re going to get. This is a fact that is not just super-logical, but also unavoidable. You simply cannot hack this. Now, your rank depends to a great extent on a little something called domain authority. In this article, we’re going to explain the concept a bit closer and see what you can do to increase domain authority in order to rank higher on Google.

Domain Authority Explained

Domain authority (DA) can be defined as the relevance of a website in its specific field, niche or industry. This relevance is calculated automatically, using complex analytic algorithms. It is scored on a scale from 1 to 100, where a lower score means lower domain authority. Websites with a score between 40 and 50 are considered to have an average domain authority. Sites with a DA of 40 or lower have poor domain authority, 50 to 60 is good and over 60 is excellent domain authority.

We won’t get into technicalities of how the DA score is actually calculated, as the concept is rather complex. We should, however, mention that, in general, domain authority encompasses four dimensions:

  • Prestige of the site and/or its authors
  • Quality of information on the site
  • Centrality of the site and its information
  • The amount of competition in the site’s particular field.

How to Check Domain Authority

Before we dig deeper into increasing domain authority, let’s see how you can find out your website’s current domain authority and then take it from there.
Domain authority, as a concept, was devised by Moz, a marketing and analytics company that also developed the tools for measuring DA. They offer a nice full suite of tools you can use to check domain authority but there are also plenty of other tools that use Moz API to offer these insights.

A very useful and well-developed DA-checking tool is Ahrefs, which is a paid service but one that returns excellent insights. The other tool we really like is Majestic, marketed as “The planet’s largest Link Index database”. It’s also a paid service with three different price tiers.

When it comes to domain authority, SEO score is of significant importance as well. To check out how your website measures up with Google, use SureOak – a professional tool that measures different aspects of your domain’s performance. Designed to help you rank higher and grow faster, SureOak offers a large number of free online SEO tools that can transform your online presence.

If you really want to work on your domain authority, you should definitely opt for one of these tools, otherwise you may not get actual, actionable insights.

How to Increase Domain Authority

Finally getting to the juicy bit of the story about domain authority, we’re now going to look into a few things everyone can do to improve their website’s domain authority.

Step 1: Build Quality Backlinks

Domain authority is all about linking. More specifically, about backlinking. You need to get backlinks, and you need to build them, and you have to pay attention to their quality.

Basically, the more backlinks you get, the better. The same goes for the ones you build. Always try to link quality websites, the ones with good or excellent domain authority. Also, make sure your links are relevant. For example, if you’re in the restaurant business, links to sites about skincare simply won’t do.

Finally, go through your links and see if any of them is bad, broken or irrelevant. You don’t want anything to do with sources that can end up damaging your domain authority.

Step 2: Improve On-Page Content

Remember that the motto “Content is King” still applies. Your website needs to have high-quality content that is linkable and therefore attractive not just to other sites but to Google crawlers as well. The logic is simple – the better your content is, the higher the chance a high-authority site will link to it. And keep in mind that good content means content that is relevant, creative, informative and well-written. And, of course, 100% original.

Step 3: Increase Internal Links

In the race to get good links from other websites, we often neglect internal linking. This is a very serious mistake since internal links are extremely powerful. They show our visitors where the relevant content is and they keep them from leaving the website due to frustration. Not to mention the technical fact that internal links help search engines index your site more easily.

Step 4: Improve Your Website Speed

Everyone hates slow-loading sites, from users to the bots search engines use to index your website. There are plenty of things you can do to improve your site speed, which will ultimately result in a lower bounce rate and a higher domain authority.

Step 5: Increase Your Social Engagement

Social signals are a major ranking factor. To get those signals, you need to get your content out on the most important and the most relevant social platforms, and to have people engage with it. By engagement, we mean likes, reposts, shares, comments and so on. Also, your site visitors have to find it extremely easy to share your content, should they feel like it. This, for one, means placing social buttons on strategic places on your pages. Also, find a way to encourage people to post comments and questions to your posts. This is one of the sure ways to increase domain authority.

Step 6: Become an Authority

This one actually requires some of the previous steps to be fully realized, especially creating quality content and having strong social engagement. In any case, the fact is that authoritative websites, with authors regarded authorities in their respective fields, simply have a higher domain authority.

Becoming an authority in your niche will not only increase your traffic significantly but it will also significantly improve the quality of links you’re getting. And that, we know, is essential for high domain authority.

Bottom Line

As a metric, domain authority does have certain limitations and definitely can’t serve as the only measuring factor. Still, it’s a metric that does create more than a considerable impact and therefore should not be neglected.

In addition, as a tool for assessing the SEO potential of a website, domain authority remains high up among the factors you simply cannot afford to ignore.

Domain authority is easy to measure using one of the many available tools. It is easy to improve, with relatively little effort. It’s also something that keeps us from forgetting the ongoing importance of proper external and internal linking.

Finally, domain authority can help us see how we fare against the competitors in our niche or industry and then fix whatever needs to be fixed in order to do better.

Now that you have learned a thing or two about how to increase domain authority of your website, your website rank should improve significantly. Remember to apply these steps consistently, and good luck.

We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!

Newsletter

WordPress perfection at your fingertips.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter using the form below. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to our YouTube channel for WordPress video tutorials.

Comments (1)

  • outsource company

    Very Nice Article…..thank you for sharing

    reply

Leave a Reply