Domain Authority (DA) Score | Steps For Ranking Website High

Nowadays, just like content is king, having a good and high Domain Authority (DA) Score for your website is a no-brainer too. Furthermore, every brand wants to rank high on search engine SERPs like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. However, there are so many roadblocks to achieving this. Your domain authority score is a very good indicator in this case.

Particularly, for gauging how your overall website will perform in some of these search engines. For this reason, to fine-tune your SEO strategy, you must know how you’re doing in comparison to your competition. With that said, however, you shouldn’t become obsessed with increasing your DA number. For there are many ways to achieve this organically.

And, as an example, it’s no good having a high DA site that doesn’t get any traffic because the pages aren’t optimized properly for their target keywords. One thing is for sure, there are many sites out there with good DA but don’t get any traffic. Yet, there are sites with low DA that get more traffic because the pages are properly optimized with good content.

What Is Domain Authority (DA) Score & Why Does It Matter?

Technically, a Domain Authority (DA) Score is a Search Engine Ranking outcome tally toolkit developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Whereby, a good Domain Authority (DA) Score outcome ranges from level 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking.

Domain Authority (DA) Score is a search metric that first came into the light from Moz to indicate the authority of all websites on the internet. Since Google stopped publicly displaying its PageRank data, DA is one of the industry standards for showing the Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) potential on websites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Technically, a DA Score is measured on a scale of 1-100. A higher score means the website has more authority and typically any pages on that site (or domain) stand a better chance at ranking, while a low score means the site will have to work harder in order to rank well for the same content. The Domain Authority metric is not used by Google at all.

But, it takes a wide variety of factors into consideration including some of the same variables Google uses, but on a much simpler scale. It’s largely calculated by evaluating the total number of inbound links and linking root domains and combining them into a single score. Generally, a Domain Authority over 60 is considered excellent.

Domain Authority (DA) Score Vs Page Authority (PA) Score Difference

As mentioned, Domain Authority (DA) is a metric that predicts how a website is likely to rank in the SERPs. While Page Authority (PA) shows how well a specific web page is likely to rank in the SERPs. Overall, this means that the DA of a website is based on the links pointing to the domain. Including the homepage and any internal page links.

Domain Authority is a useful metric when you want to analyze the ranking potential of a website. Typically, sites with a higher DA will rank higher in the SERPs than sites with a lower DA. This is of course a generalization as there are many other variables involved, such as how well the page is optimized for specific keywords, the content page quality, etc.

The DA of your website will usually change over time. If you have a DA of 30 today, this doesn’t mean you will have a DA of 30 next week. DA and PA updates from Moz are becoming more and more frequent these days. Typically, your site’s DA will increase over time as it gains more backlinks and trust. However, it is possible for your DA to decrease with time.

More so, if you lose backlinks or if Moz makes a change to their algorithms that calculate the DA metric. Realistically, this happened recently when they introduced their Domain Authority 2.0 to many websites. So, whereas DA measures the predictive ranking strength of entire domains or subdomains, PA measures the strength of individual pages.

How Calculating A Domain Authority (DA) Score Works

Basically, a Site Domain Authority (DA) Score calculation is done by evaluating multiple factors. Including linking root domains and a total number of links, into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” over time. Domain Authority is not a Google rank factor — has no effect on the SERPs.

As of the Domain Authority 2.0 update in early 2019, the calculation of a domain’s DA score comes from a machine learning algorithm’s predictions about how often Google is using that domain in its search results. If domain A is more likely to appear in a Google SERP than domain B is, then we would expect domain A’s DA to be higher than domain B’s DA.

At all costs, you can easily find out the Domain Authority of any website using the Moz Link Explorer, MozBar (free SEO toolbar), or in the SERP Keyword Explorer and analysis section. Domain Authority metrics are also incorporated into all Moz Pro Campaigns, the Moz API, and dozens of SEO and online marketing platforms across the web.

Get Started: Check Your Site Domain Authority For Free Using Moz Tools

That said, you can learn more about the Domain Authority update and how to discuss it with your team with this presentation to your advantage. Or rather, explore how to use DA 2.0 metrics with this comprehensive whitepaper in detail. Since DA is based on machine learning calculations, your site’s score will often fluctuate from time to time.

The key reason is that either more, fewer, or different data points become available and are incorporated into those calculations. For instance, if facebook.com were to acquire a billion new links, every other site’s DA would drop relative to Facebook’s. Because more established and authoritative domains like Facebook will have increasingly larger link profiles.

Thus, they take up more of the high-DA slots, leaving less room at the higher end of the scale for other domains with less robust link profiles. So, it’s important to use DA as a comparative metric rather than an absolute one.

What Is A Good/Average Domain Authority (DA) Score?

Generally speaking, sites with very large numbers of high-quality external links (such as wikipedia.com or google.com) are at the top end of the Domain Authority scale, whereas small businesses and websites with fewer inbound links may have much lower DA scores. Exploring the Moz list of the top 500 sites on the web can help you quite a lot.

Especially, in order for you to understand the impact that Domain Authority and other link-based metrics have on a site’s rankings and popularity. Whilst, keeping in mind, a brand-new website will always start with a Domain Authority score of 1. And, given time, that score will increase as the site earns more and more authoritative backlinks over time.

To know what is good domain authority, you need to check how much a website reaches on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 as the best possible score. When Moz created this metric, they also made the tool available for website analysis. You can also check DA using Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool.

To rank website domain authority consider that:

• Scores between 40 and 50 are considered average.
• Domain Authority between 50 and 60 must be rated as good.
• Scores above 60 rate the Domain Authority as excellent.

Equally important, it’s also good to acknowledge many different contexts when evaluating DA. If you are running a small business website with SEO optimizations underway and you can still get something around 40 points. Of course, that’s a score to consider an average one. However, the requirement changes for large company sites.

With more work and investment power, you must expect to achieve great DA values. If the score does not reach above 60, then the evaluation is bad considering this context. Because Domain Authority is a predictor of a site’s ability to rank within its unique competitive landscape, you shouldn’t choose your target DA in a vacuum.

Learn More: Web Applications Design Tools Every Webmaster Should Have

Look at the DA scores for the sites you compete with directly in the SERPs and aim for a higher score than your competitors. DA is best used as a comparative metric when investigating niche sites.

Particularly, those within your target SERPs that may have more powerful link profiles than you do — your true competitors. Again, because the metric is relative, there’s no such thing as an absolutely “good,” “average,” or “bad” DA score — there are only scores that are “good,” “average,” or “bad” — within the context of a given competitive landscape.

Therefore, it’s significantly easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it is to grow it from 70 to 80. And now that we have a basic understanding of how domain authority is calculated, let’s take a look at some of the steps to use.

Steps To Improve Your Site Domain Authority (DA) Score

Increasing your DA can take a lot of work. You can’t just make a few tweaks to your website and expect your Domain Authority and rankings to skyrocket – this is a long-term process. Your focus shouldn’t solely be based on increasing your DA alone. But rather, focus on improving your website as a whole and focusing more on general SEO principles.

The best way to influence the Domain Authority metric is to improve your site’s overall SEO health, with a particular focus on the quality and quantity of external links pointing to your site. Because Domain Authority aggregates so many pieces of data, it can be difficult to influence directly. This metric is meant to predict how competitive a given site will be.

More so, in SERPs such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or even AOL search results. So to speak, Google considers so many ranking factors in determining its rankings algorithm. Meaning, that a metric that tries to approximate its determinations must incorporate a similar number and complexity of factors.

With the Moz free trial, you can track your Domain Authority changes over time. You’ll also be able to compare your site score with competitors, analyze in-depth link metrics, and more with Moz Pro. Take a 30-day free trial first, and then see what you can achieve. It can give anyone looking at this metric an idea of how well the site would likely do on SERPs.

Below are some more actionable steps that you can take toward improving your overall DA score. As well as the SEO ranking potential of your site as a whole. Just follow each one of them to the letter to see how effective they can be.

Step #1: Pick a domain name that suits your business

On one hand, as of today, choosing a domain name requires thought and careful consideration. Bearing in mind, it’s your identity on the web — an online office for your business in that case. On the other hand, in terms of a good domain name value, it should be relevant to the content on your website. As well as the key service solutions you provide.

Secondly, it should be easy to remember — such as josephmuciraexclusives.com in our case. Perse, if your website focuses on WordPress SEO plugins, then you can have something like PluginFactory.com, and so on. You should also try to use keywords that describe your brand. If not, use a definitive term site title — like Web Tech Experts in ours.

Another example would be if you offer glass replacement services, your domain name can be A1GlassRepair.com. And then, thereafter, try to share the site name with your friends to make sure it’s appealing to others. Having a good domain name doesn’t directly improve your domain authority, but indirectly it can have a knock-on effect.

And, in the long run, it’ll also encourage people to link to your website as an authoritative resource. That’s if your domain has a cool brand name, is memorable, and has link-worthy content.

Step #2: Utilize great design features and development elements

Simply put, a web designer’s focus is the look and feel of a website. Whereas, a web developer focuses on the technical side of things. On the contrary, a developer who does client-side programming will have a direct impact on the look, layout, and feel of a website. By considering your Site Domain Authority (DA) Score, all of this will fall into place.

There are special marketplaces where both WordPress Templates and Plugins are available. I recommend making your choice based on the most popular trading platform ThemeForest.net. In addition to quality assurance (moderation before addition), the platform has useful functions that simplify the selection process. This is yet a useful ranking factor.

Similarly, a Website Blog Pages Design is the practice of optimizing a site blog’s layout outlook, its branding and appearance feel, its target user readability, and its overall performance functionality. Particularly, in order to maximize its unique visitation traffic, user readership, and increase its lead conversions.

There’s also a reason why Website Pages Taxonomy Structure matters in UX design these days. Best of all, in WordPress, you can put content on your site as either “Website Posts” or “Website Pages”. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts, in a default setup, appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page.

Step #3: Increase your site potential with inbound links 

Inbound Links are links coming from another site to your own website. Whereby, the term “Inbound” is generally used by the person receiving the link. While on the other hand, outbound links are links from your website to another website. Therefore, internal links are links on a certain website or blog post that links to another page on that same website.

If you haven’t harnessed the power of inbound links, you are likely missing out. These links allow the search engine algorithms to view your site as an authority in your niche. To increase your inbound links naturally, someone has to visit your website and give it a stamp of approval as a good resource and want to link to it.

When such actions are repeated over time, you improve your website authority and traffic. By the same token, there’re many other ways of increasing inbound links that you can consider. They include publishing blog posts, commenting on other blogs, reviewing industry products, posting on social media, guest posting on other blogs, and so on.

Sitemaps are also a great way of organizing a website and identifying the URLs and the data under each section. Previously, they were primarily geared toward the users of the website. However, Google’s XML format was designed for search engines, allowing them to find the data faster and more efficiently.

Step #4: Try to publish high-quality and relevant content

The fastest way to boost your domain authority is to publish valuable content regularly. When you focus on fresh content, you’ll gain many followers who appreciate your work and link to it. After you publish the content, you should share it on social media. What if you pump out low-quality blog posts and your content doesn’t stand out?

Well, you probably won’t rank high or encourage people to link to it. People like websites with great, quality, and relevant content, but that load quickly too. The easiest way to produce quality content is to know your customers.

Does your content spark their interest? Another way is to check your competitors. Observe what resonates with the audience of the competing business. Research is imperative, whether you’re creating visual or audio content.

Step #5: Make sure that you improve your website speed

When your site loads fast, you’ll have an advantage over slower websites. It also enhances user experience which translates to more signups and sales. A slow website can have a tremendous effect on your bounce rate, and because most people are impatient, they will end up leaving your site altogether.

Thankfully, there are many tactics to make your site load faster given any circumstances. WordPress is a content management system based on PHP and MySQL that is usually used with MySQL or MariaDB database servers but can also use the SQLite database engine. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system (Themes).

You can learn how to design a WordPress website, first page, from scratch easily! Another effective way of improving speed is by reducing redirects. Most visitors don’t wait for the HTTP response cycle to complete. You should also try to optimize images. You should ensure the images are not larger than they need to be.

The fastest websites take 0.18 seconds to load while slow websites can take more than 10 seconds.

Step #6: Try to create a working on-site SEO strategy

This is a practice of optimizing elements on pages of your website to target different keywords and phrases in the search engine results pages (SERPS). By optimizing your pages, both search engines and their users can get a better understanding of what they are all about. The ultimate goal is to find a page that is relevant to search queries.

If you want to improve your domain authority, you need to work on your SEO. One way of improving on-site SEO is user engagement. How engaging is your content? This is a good indicator of the improvements you need to make on your site. Other aspects of on-page SEO are title tags and meta descriptions. They help readers and search engines in many ways.

Like to find what they are looking for. If your page titles and descriptions stand out in the SERPS, people will click on your website listings. If your tiles and descriptions are relevant to the keywords, Google will rank your website higher.

Step #7: Have a social media marketing strategic plan

When starting a Social Media App Development project, it’s necessary to understand that having a mobile application is a prerequisite element for its overall success. Also, when we talk about the costs, you should keep in mind that most of the time and cost are related to the backend — what happens in the shadows and makes the app/web project work.

Having excellent client feedback on your brand’s Facebook page is a good example of social proof. If it comes down to your business and close competition, your positive reviews could sway potential customers to your side. There’s an effective tactic that most companies employ to make sure customers provide feedback after purchasing a product.

And, that’s by simply reaching out to customers and asking them for a testimonial. So, social media plays a key role in determining your domain authority. You should increase your followers by posting your blog posts. Perhaps, you may want to increase your social media clicks by running ads on Twitter and Facebook.

It’s worth mentioning pages that rank high on Google have many likes, shares, and tweets. This is one of Google’s many ranking signals. To increase your domain authority, you should integrate social media buttons on your pages. This makes it easy for your readers to share your content. But before you post your content on social networks, be sure it looks great.

Step #8: Make sure your website is AMP and mobile-friendly

Most online users use their mobile phones and other handheld devices like tablets to access the web these days. If your site is not mobile-friendly, you could be lagging behind the competition. You can also lose visitors if something is not displayed well on mobile. Google also follows mobile-first indexing in its ranking and will favor mobile-friendly sites.

In comparison to those that don’t have a mobile-optimized version of their site. You should also keep in mind that many people take their time to read content through their mobile devices. Think about the information they could be looking for and make it easy for them to find it on your web pages. You should also think about the size of the screen in use.

And then again, make the buttons large enough to click on when viewing on mobile devices. This will save visitors a lot of frustration. A WebP Image is yet another great format feature that utilizes both lossy and lossless compression formats. Thus, being able to create images that use mixed compression formats lets you create rich, smaller file-size images.

More and more people prefer to browse the internet and shop online using their mobile devices. A Website Mobile App is a convenient way to deliver your content. In addition, offering a better mobile user-based experience.

Step #9: Track, monitor, and remove bad backlinks

Bad backlinks can lower your SERP ranking or kill your SEO metrics. You must go through your profile to remove toxic links. The most effective way of removing bad links is by asking your webmaster to remove them. This can take a lot of time and you may have to pay for the links to be removed in certain situations. If you can’t remove them you should disavow them.

You should also make sure you are not linking out to any bad sites or have any broken links on any of your pages. This will also have a negative impact on your rankings. Another option would be for you to register a new domain name and start from scratch if you have a lot of bad links. This may seem like a drastic move, right?

But, it’s a fast and effective way of cleaning a lot of toxic backlinks which are dragging your site down. SEOs used to be focused on just creating SEO-friendly content and backlinks. But now, that’s not the case. Many still do focus on those tactics and haven’t evolved. But, a good holistic SEO approach expert will look at multiple facets of the marketing plan.

They’ll eventually understand how to drive the most value out of them all. And, they’ll ultimately show the best possible value to Google, search engines, and those who visit your website.

Step #10: Publish guest blog posts on your website 

You can siphon off authority, link juice, and traffic to your websites by guest posting on other blogs. This increases the reputation of your site and enhances your domain authority. When you publish your guest posts, make sure you add links back to your website where you can. Preferably, in the body of the blog posts as opposed to the bottom bio section.

For your information, Editorial Links are the best types of links. These are links that result from a site having good content and marketing techniques. An editorial link is not paid for or directly requested, as is the case with acquired links. Editorial links are part of a strong link profile. You can link back to your website from an authority blog in your guest posts.

Or even receive a mention from an authoritative website in general. And, by so doing, some of the authority will transfer back to your website and increase your DA. At all times, you should focus on following basic SEO fundamentals. And then, work on writing and publishing high-quality content which gives readers what they are looking for.

You should also research the keywords you are targeting and optimize your pages properly. If your content is good, this will attract natural backlinks from other bloggers which will, in turn, increase your DA over time.

Why A Change In Your Domain Authority (DA) Score?

The key to understanding Domain Authority fluctuations is recognizing that each domain’s score depends on comparison to other domains all across the DA scale. So that even if a website improves its SEO, its Authority score may not always reflect that.  Because Domain Authority aggregates so many pieces of data, it can be difficult to influence directly.

This metric is meant to predict how competitive a given site will be in Google search results, and since Google considers so many ranking factors in determining its rankings, a metric that tries to approximate its determinations must incorporate a similar number and complexity of factors.

Usually, because a Domain Authority (DA) Score comprises multiple metrics and calculations, pinpointing the exact cause of a change can be a challenge. If your score has gone up or down, there are many potential factors.

Including things like:

• Your link profile growth hasn’t yet been captured in the Moz web index
• The highest-authority sites experienced substantial link growth, skewing the scaling process
• You earned links from places that don’t contribute to Google rankings
• Moz crawled (and included in our index) more or fewer of your linking domains than in a previous crawl
• Your Site DA is on the lower end of the scoring spectrum and is thus more impacted by scaling fluctuations
• Your site was affected by the implementation of Domain Authority 2.0, which caused a 6% average decrease
• A DA decrease across all websites due to restructuring and improvements to the way DA is calculated

In nutshell, Domain Authority works in a similar fashion. Its bases are on machine learning and constant comparison against every other website on the scale. After each update, recalculations mean that the score of a given site could go down even if that site has improved its link profile. Such is the nature of a relative, scaled system.

Therefore — and this is important enough that we’ll emphasize it once more — Domain Authority Scores are best viewed as comparative rather than absolute metrics.

Final Words:

In addition to the list of steps we’ve seen above, Website Security is also another element to consider. It’s so important because nobody wants to have a hacked website. Having a secure website is as vital to someone’s online presence as having a website host. If a website is hacked and blocklisted, for example, it loses up to 98% of its traffic.

On the same note, Website Optimization is the process of using tools, advanced strategies, and experiments to improve the performance of your website, further drive more traffic, increase conversions, and grow revenue. It’s quite useful since one of the most critical aspects of website optimization is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as such.

A Website Header is another great tool to consider. It sits at the top of each page and serves a few very important purposes. In fact, this does more than just provide a place for your logo. For one thing, it is part of a consistent user experience that all good websites share. However, the design of a Website Header Design may differ from site to site.

More Related Weblog Topics:

1. Responsive Web Design (RWD) | For AMP-Ready Websites
2. Website Menu Design | How To Do It Right In Simple Steps
3. What Are Algorithms? Their Role In Maths, Computing & SEO
4. How A Website Design Is Done | Simple Steps Beginners Guide
5. Why Website Heatmaps Are Important In UX Content Design
6. Site Taxonomy SEO | Categories, Tags & Archives Audit Tips

That’s it! Everything you need to know about the benefits of a site DA score and some (if not all) simple steps to improve your SERPs ranking position. Do you think there’s something we miss? What is your site ranking experience so far? Do you think Moz is a great DA score and ranking tool to utilize in your strategy? Well, let us know all your thoughts!

But, if you’ll need more support, you can always Consult Us and let us know how we can sort you out. Likewise, feel free to share with us your additional opinions, suggestions, contributions, and recommendations in our comments section. Or even check our FAQs & Answers for more. You’re also welcome to Donate in support of what we do and motivate us.