You may have heard about Domain authority. However, do you know why increasing domain authority is important?
Many of the bloggers think that this is merely one of the Moz metrics to calculate the trust of the site. However, this is not completely true.
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How to Increase Domain Authority[/caption]Domain Authority is important in both rankings and others. Here are some of the benefits of Domain authority.
- Increased SERP position.
- Attracts guest posts and comments.
- Attracts advertisers.
- Attracts sponsored posts
- Increase affiliate sales.
Let me explain it a little further. People and search engines trust the information shared on the site with high domain authority.
People will more likely believe in you and consider the products recommended by you.
Backlinks from authoritative sites are considered as a gem. Advertisers are attracted to sites with high authority.
Now you know the benefits of high Domain authority. But how to increase Domain authority? It remained as a million dollar question.
That’s the exact thing, which I’m going to tell you in this post.
Before diving in let me tell you the factors on which domain authority is calculated.
How domain authority is calculated?
- Number of QUALITY backlinks pointing to your site.
- The number of quality social shares.
- Age of domain.
- Rankings in search engines.
- Linking root domains.
- Traffic and Alexa rank.
- SEO friendliness.
How to increase domain authority?
Improving all the above stuff increases the domain authority greatly.
Let me explain it in detail.
The QUALITY of backlinks win over quantity
If yours is an internet marketing blog, then how about getting tons of backlinks from health blogs? Not fair, isn’t it?
Likewise, the relevancy and quality of backlinks matters a lot. Always look to attain backlinks from authoritative sites within your niche.
In this matter, BUYING BACKLINKS SUCKS!
Be consistent in terms of backlink building. Suddenly getting many of the inbound links may smell fishy. It will definitely decrease search engine rankings and in turn, domain authority will be decreased.
Always make room for natural backlinks, consider guest posting as the second go. Keep guest posting to minimal.
Disavow any links (even authoritative) backlinks pointing from guest blogging sites to your site. These days, even a single backlink pointing to your site from guest blogging networks can harm your search rankings and trust score.
Say bye bye for buying likes and tweets, get quality social shares.
Are the simulating social shares? Google is stressing more and more on social shares.
If a person with no social activity or if a health niche blogger shares your Internet marketing Content, it would return no value.
Google has become smarter in identifying FAKE social activities with that of real.
QUALITY OF SOCIAL shares is the future of SEO.
A single share from great bloggers carry much value than that of others.
If great bloggers and influencers share your content, then it is the indication that your content deserves it, and domain authority will be increased.
One of the surefire ways to get quality social shares is to regularly share the content of authoritative bloggers and influencers in your niche. Comment on the authoritative blogs in your niche, interview famous bloggers, share their content, outreach them, build relationships. It encourages them to share your content if it is really awesome.
BLOGGING IS ALL ABOUT GIVE-AND-TAKE.
Reply to all comments on your blog. Letting your readers know that you are reading and valuing the comments of theirs, you’re encouraging them to visit your blog repeatedly and share your content. It also helps in building healthy relationships with your audience and retaining them as loyal readers of your blog.
Loyal readership is damn important to increase the domain authority.
Keep a low bounce rate
On page SEO factors like bounce rates, exit rates are playing a crucial role in ranking and domain authority of your blog.
Metrics like bounce rates clearly highlights the user experience with your blog.
If your blog or site has high quality content, users tend to read some more stuff, hence lower, and better is the bounce rate.
In case of authoritative content only, low bounce rate is possible. If sites have authoritative high quality content with a low bounce rate then it is clear that the site deserves high domain authority.
In order, to reduce bounce rate you may have to follow interlinking strategies. Internally linking your blog posts will be helpful both in terms of SEO, rankings, bounce rates and hence increases domain authority.
High PageSpeed
Along with the quality content if a site has fast PageSpeed, then it is a clear indication that the site is user friendly.
In order to call your site as authoritative, it should have great content and user experience. Great PageSpeed indirectly adds up to the domain authority.
Great PageSpeed increases Crawlability, rankings and hence domain authority. They are all interdependent.
With great PageSpeed, your content will get more exposure.
With great pagespeed, many of the mobile users will also be the loyal readers of your blog. It increases the mobile user experience.
High quality outbound links
Many of the webmasters only care about inbound links. They think that outbound links don’t matter in SEO. However, this is not true. By outbound links, you are upvoting the content on other blogs. Whom you vote matters.
By looking at the content in the outbound links, search engines determine the RELATIONSHIP between the two pieces of content. The content to which you link to should be relevant. Having irrelevant outbound links hurt rankings.
Always tend to link to sites with high rankings and domain authority. Linking out to low quality sites may hurt your rankings.
High quality outbound links increase readership and helps in building relationships with great influential bloggers in your niche. It also gives other bloggers a reason to link back to you.
Great types of content
Great content helps in getting high-quality back links and hence increases domain authority. Here are some of the types of content that get high quality backlinks and shares.
- Infographics: Make sure to include embed code and allow others to include your infographics in their site. This gives you high-quality backlinks.
- List posts: they are easy to digest and read. Many of the people tend to share list posts more.
- Case studies: People need proof for your sayings. Case studies are highly linkable and shareable content.
- Interviews: it is the easiest way to produce great content. Interviewing an authoritative blogger on your site or blog, encourages that blogger to share the interview. Hence, your blog or site gets much more exposure with that of the audience of the blogger you interview.
These types of contents get more backlinks and quality shares. It is a clear indication that your content is of high-quality. Hence increases domain authority.
Increase returning visitors
Returning visitors are the one who visit your blog by remembering the URL and entering manually or clicking on the bookmark.
If more and more visitors and readers return to your blog then they surely have come across a great quality stuff in your blog. Do you know one thing? The browser bookmarks that every of your visitors make acts as a vote for quality content of your blog (Chrome data collection).
What makes visitors to return repeatedly to your blog? Of course, it’s quality content.
As a bonus with increased the returning visitors you’re less dependent on search engines. Even if you are hit (unlikely) by any algorithmic penalty, your blog will not be devastated.
Branding is crucial to increase a loyal readership and the number of returning visitors. It should promote the brand of your blog both off-line and online. Your blog name should be easy to remember, and it should also be keyword friendly.
The example of blog names that are both brandable and keyword friendly are ProBlogger, CopyBlogger, and even mine.
Other tips:
- Create Facebook, Google Plus, pages for your blog or site and engage your audience.
- Host a webinar.
- Give away your brand T-shirt for your blog subscribers.
- Get traction for the blog post that you are yet to publish, by updating your status like: “Are you ready for my next blog post?”. If a blog post receives more direct visitors as soon as it is published then it is a great indication of quality content.
- Always aim for getting more visitors to your new blog post as soon as it is published.
- Repurpose your content to reach the maximum number of audience.
- Contribute to other sites
Final words
Blogging is not rocket science. Likewise, you should be patient, whileincreasing domain authority. It takes time.
The average domain authority after six months old blog is around 40-50. As your blog keeps on growing, the maximum possible domain authority of an average blog is 90 to 95. However, don’t be devastated if you can’t achieve the milestone.
Don’t be too paranoid about the domain authority; it will be automatically increased with the increase of traffic and rankings. You can check for domain authority of the site at OpenSiteExplorer.
It is also worthwhile to note that domain authority acts as one of the important ranking factors of Google.
If you read this blog post on increasing domain authority, then do comment and share.
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