Increasing Domain Authority And Page Ranking the Right Way
Increasing domain authority and getting the topmost rank on the search engine results page is a worthwhile goal for any digital marketing campaign. This is supported by statistics that state that the topmost results on the first SERP will get 31.7% of all clicks. The rest just get a meager 0.78% of the click-throughs.
So, it goes without saying that you’d rather want to have your pages reach the top results in any particular query. Are there ways how to increase Domain authority and page rank? The answer, of course, is a yes.
However, there are a few things that we have to address first before we go about learning how to boost ranking and DA.
What Is Domain Authority?
Page ranking is an understandable concept even for beginners. It is simply your page’s positioning in the search engine results pages. What is not easy to understand, however, is Increasing Domain Authority. More often than not, this will be the first time that you are hearing about it.
Increasing Domain Authority is this new performance metric for determining page ranking. Created by the SEO software Moz, Domain Authority calculates the likelihood that your pages are going to reach the topmost position in the SERPs.
There are many ways to calculate Domain Authority, but most will deal with backlinking and referrals. Moz also looks at other factors that they constantly update, but the factors mentioned above will have the most impact.
How Moz rates Domain Authority is by a 100-point scheme. Is there a good range to meet to have strong Domain Authority? That depends greatly on the site that you have and other factors in your brand.
For example, a site gets 50 for their Domain Authority. That might sound a bit low but what if the competitor sites get lower DA scores? That would still mean that the site with a 50-point DA still outranks the competition as far as keywords, backlinking, and referrals are concerned.
Also, getting a 100 for Domain Authority is practically impossible today unless it is part of corporations like Meta. And even if you are partnered with industry leaders, there is still no assurance that your pages will have a 100% likelihood of always being at the topmost SERP ranks.
So, an attainable goal in learning how to increase Domain Authority and page rank is this: get a score that is always higher than your competitors.
Other Facts about Domain Authority
As it is a relatively new concept, is there a point in learning how to increase domain authority and page rank? To answer that question, it is best to get acquainted with a few more facts about this metric.
It Determines Ranking Probability, Not Ranking Itself
Increasing Domain Authority might tell you the likelihood of your pages reaching the first SERP but it is not itself a factor for page ranking. Thus, there are pages out there with low DA scores that can outrank sites with higher DA, especially if they have high engagement, unique content, and specific audience targeting.
That being said, Moz does use other factors that determine Google ranking when calculating DA. This will include the linking of root domains and linking pages. What this means is that there is still a positive relationship between ranking and domain authority in metrics like keyword rankings, site traffic, and general results page positioning.
Increasing Domain Authority – It Is not the Only Metric for Authority
As Domain Authority is the brainchild of Moz, it is not the sole performance
metric for Authority as other programs have their counterpart. This includes Citation Flow from Majestic and Authority Score from SEMrush.
What this tells you is that scores can differ greatly, depending on who is scoring your pages. That also means that Domain Authority is not the sole authority in
determining how your pages are going to rank in the SERPs. However, it is rather effective for the purpose it was designed for.
So, if it is not the authority metric, what is? That would be Google’s PageRank which, sadly, had been hidden since people found a way to exploit the scores. Now, only Google knows how PageRank contributes to your page’s position in the SERPs.
Increasing Domain Authority – It helps with SEO
Learning how to increase domain authority and page rank are not mutually exclusive activities. This is because Domain Authority can be boosted through backlinks and many SEO strategies focus on you building exactly that.
Sure, strategies like on-page SEO will not directly affect your domain authority score but those off-site strategies will. Just do remember that SEO campaigns that focus on more than one tactic are more effective.
How to Increase Domain Authority and Ranking
Before anything else, you have to understand that there are two ways to increase your domain authority and page ranking. The first one is the safe way and will cover methods that will be discussed later.
The second way is the illegal, “black hat” approach that will include exploiting some metrics in search engines. And since they are deemed illegal, you will be penalized heavily if Google discovers that you are using them for your pages.
With that out of the way, here are some of the legitimate link-building methods that you can use for your pages.
Online Directories
If your business is relatively young, one of the methods you can use to boost your page rankings is by getting registered in an online directory. Directories are cheap as they don’t require more than $100.00 every year to maintain the listing and yield quite a lot of impact for whatever market segment you are targeting.
If you get listed in sites like Yellow Pages, you help search engines like Google understand who you are and what markets you operate in. This will make it easier for the search bots to recommend you for queries relevant to the markets you do business in.
Content Creation
Yes, the oft-abused phrase “Content is King” is still true in 2022. You will find out that many of the strategies on how to increase domain authority and page rank are quite dependent on unique quality content to be effective.
But that does beg the question:
what does quality content look like now?
Despite the constant algorithm updates, the standards for content have not changed that much in 5 years.
As of now, your content should have the following elements:
A Multimedia Approach
Every form of media that can be published through the Internet has to target at least 4 of the 5 human senses. This is why your content should have a mixture of at least two media types. This might be text and images, text and video, or all three.
Keyword Incorporation
Your keywords are essentially the phrases that your audience types in the search box when asking a question. The search engine AI will then scour the entire Internet to find these keywords. The more these keywords are seen in your content, the better your page ranking will be.
This is why keyword usage is one of the effective methods on how to increase domain authority and page rank. However, Google also requires that your keywords must be naturally incorporated into your content. That is to say that they form a part of a standard sentence or conversation without sounding forced.
One exploit used in the past was keyword stuffing where content writers just repeat the same keywords over and over for an article. Thankfully, Google shut that down with their algorithm update in the mid-2010s.
There is no proper figure on how many times keywords must appear in your content. But to be safe, make sure that it appears for no more than 3% in an entire article.
A Strong Call to Action
Your content must not only be informative but must also be actionable. From the perspective of the audience, this means that your content must not only teach them something, but help them do something that will benefit them in the real world.
For your part, you should also compel your readers to do something for you. This might be as simple as telling them to click on a link that will take them to some other page. It does not matter what you require them to do once they get there. If they do click through, that will boost the page ranking by way of traffic.
Also, you help your audience go through the customer conversion process with a strong call to action. Aside from increasing your domain authority through backlinks, your CTA could also lead to an increase in sales.
Increasing Domain Authority – Original
One thing that the search engines really hate with content right now is duplication. Sure, you might talk about the same thing as with other sites and bring out nearly the same points or issues. However, you have to make sure that everything you put out there is 100% coming from your own thoughts.
A practice in the past was the use of “spin” software that automatically re-writes content. Fortunately, the search engines quickly caught on to this and de-ranked every page that contained duplicate or plagiarized content.
Since originality is important right now, you can take things further by talking about topics that nobody else has talked about or to great lengths in the past. This will require extensive research, but if your topic is compelling, you are essentially presenting your ideas from a place of authority.
If your content gains enough traction, you will notice that people will use your ideas for their own content, reply to your ideas, or add more information. Essentially, you drive links to your pages just by taking the time to publish entirely original and novel content. Promoting your content will also help drive traffic and links even further.
Evergreen
The content becomes evergreen when it stays “fresh” for several years. That simply means that whatever message it has to convey remains relevant, regularly visited, and engaging for years to come.
This is important as traffic eventually wanes for content weeks after they are published. In time, you will find out your pages will not be visited by users in the months to follow.
There are many ways that you can keep your content fresh. The easiest is in making sure that you present your ideas in a manner that is so engaging that people will continually go back to your pages and re-engage with your content.
If this is not possible, you can make your content form a “part” of an ongoing narrative.
Perhaps you can make your audience go back to older pages to learn about topics that you only lightly covered in your new content. Some content creators use this to their advantage whenever a new development for a certain issue comes and they would just tell their audience to go through their previous content for some context.
Either way, the constant flow of traffic and engagement in your content will give an impression to the search engines that your brand knows what it is talking about. Thus, this will drive your page rankings to a certain degree.
Increasing Domain Authority Improve the Linking
What usually ruins domain authority is the presence of bad and dead links. Sadly, a lot of website owners do not consider where they are directing their audiences to either outside of their website or in.
While you are doing any of your active marketing campaigns, you should also take a look at the linking structure of your website. Do they lead to somewhere? Is the page where they are going to be directed optimized? Remember that every page of your site must be redesigned and optimized to contribute to the overall user experience.
The same goes for any link that takes your audience to another site. Fortunately, there are link manager apps that you can use that will help you manage all of the links in one dashboard. This way, you do not spend a lot of time checking which links embedded in each of your pages are dead, broken, or leads to somewhere you’d rather not direct your audience to.
Constantly optimizing your links will help in funneling traffic through all of your content while also helping your audience convert into paying customers. Any dead or broken link will just prompt your audience to do their business elsewhere.
A Mobile-Friendly Website
As of now, there are close to 7.26 billion people who access the Internet through their mobile devices. That is 91.54% of the world’s current population that you would rather not miss out on and attract to your website.
Thus, a mobile-friendly website design is one of the best methods on how to increase domain authority and page rank. You can check how mobile-friendly your current site layout is with tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. You just have to input your site’s URL and the AI will do the rest of analysing how optimized it is for mobile devices.
If not, you can redesign your website with site builders like Wix and Squarespace. These builders have a lot of tools and features that you can use to change the very layout of your site and make it look professional. Of course, the option to make your site mobile-friendly is embedded in some options, especially in the aspects of navigation, scaling, and page-to-page transitions.
And the best about site builders? You don’t need to learn coding language just to understand what effects each option will bring to your site.
Increase Loading Speeds
And while we are on the topic of your website’s layout, one other aspect of your site should be given attention: loading speed. How quick your site loads depends greatly on the number of assets it has to access and the very design of each page.
The problem here is that a lot of users do not have patience for slow-loading websites. The more time it takes for every feature of your page to load, the less willing that internet users will be to continue their experience with your website. And if you are running an online business, a high bounce rate can be fatal for you as most buyers would leave before they reach the checkout page.
Fortunately, there are tools out there that can help you figure out if your
pages are loading quickly like Google’s PageSpeed tool. You might even find out which pages in your site load the longest.
There is no set standard for speed here, but you have to make sure
that everything loads up in a matter of seconds.
In areas with good internet speeds, your pages should load everything as if the person were switching channels on the TV.
Alternative Link Building
Building links lies at the core of every strategy on how to increase domain authority and page rank. Fortunately, almost all SEO strategies do focus on link building,
so that is pretty much covered if you do any SEO for your site.
However, there are other, none-SEO methods that you can do to build organic links. Here are some of them:
Community Participation
All you have to do is maintain an active presence in social media channels. If someone mentions your brand in a positive light, take the time to make a reply. You should also take the time to respond to comments made on each post on your business’s social media page. More often than not, a reply would start a conversation that drives engagement for your content even further.
Partnering
Although increasing domain authority is about appeasing the algorithm,
you can still leverage the human connections you made to boost your ranking. Find a business or industry expert whose services complement whatever you have to offer.
Once you have found a potential partner, what you have to do is to set up
a scheme where they would link one of your pages in their content. In return, you should also provide links to their content with yours.
You can also do promotions with your partner for both of your audiences.
Not only will this improve traffic to both sites as well as linking, but the
potential for an increase in sales as well.
This is not exactly cheating as all you are doing is mentioning another brand while also getting mentioned in return. You only have to make sure that
your promotional content is marked as such so as not to get penalized by Google.
Guest Blog
Guest blogging for popular sites is one of the best methods on how to increase domain authority and page rank. The most obvious advantage here is
that you can link any page of your site with your blog post to
funnel traffic there.
Another advantage is that it can introduce people to the style of content that you make. If they like it, they might just visit your site to find out what else you have to offer.
Following Google’s Guidelines
Perhaps the easiest method on how to increase domain authority and
page rank is to simply provide what the search engines are looking for.
This means appeasing their standards and making sure that
whatever content you push is compliant with the guidelines.
For instance, Google has recently included content quality and site/creator
credibility as part of their page rankings. What this means is that it is
recommended that site owners invest in the quality of their
content creators. Preferably, they should be experts in their fields
or at least know what they are talking about.
This would also mean that you have to provide the most accurate and recent information about your website to Google. They should know what exactly your brand’s expertise is just by looking at your different pages. This way, they would know how to rank your site in queries relevant to the industries you operate in.
To Conclude
So, even if it does not technically ensure top ranking, learning how
Domain Authority influences your brand’s visibility on the Internet will still matter. This is not only because they use the same metrics used by Google
in determining your page rankings, but also gives insight into how you can perform better SEO.
All in all, improving your domain authority and page ranking will
depend greatly on how you present your brand and your content,
as well as how people perceive your business as a whole.
Thus, by improving your DA scoring, you can also improve the aspects
that ultimately contribute to how Google ranks your pages in the SERPs.