4 Reasons You Should Be Building Your Domain Authority

Website ranking is a relatively well-known and appreciated concept. As a website owner or developer, you might be familiar with how this ranking works and how it affects your website. As the world’s top search engine, Google ranks millions of websites the world over but what most people are not aware of is Domain Authority’s role in this ranking.

What is it?

Domain Authority (DA) is a quantitative measure of your site’s power or authority. Based on a 100-point scale, DA can predict how well your site shall rank on Google. A strong DA ensures that Google will more than likely trust any post you create than they will other sites that have less than credible DA. This will see your work rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), even when you have not incorporated important SEO features such as backlinks.

As your website continuously posts high-quality work that individuals and search engines alike regard as accurate, your domain will begin to gain trust in the search algorithm’s eye. This explains why established site’s material always rank highly in SERPs whereas newbie websites are a few pages back in the SERPs even though they may have excellent content.

Domain vs. Page Authority

In the beginning, Google’s PageRank was arguably the best tool to measure the authority and quality of a particular page. However, it is no longer accessible to the public. Moz’s Page Authority is probably the most important tool for measuring an individual page’s strength. It is feasible that you may have a higher PA then DA, and vice versa. While both attributes are important to your search rankings, you should prioritize DA since it tends to pay dividends in the long term. A healthy DA should translate these benefits into your pages anyways.

More about DA

Moz is the first company to rank sites based on their content, work, and reputation. Even though these algorithms may fail to generate revenue for your site, you need to realize that search engines value this ranking parameter and thus your DA will affect how your site appears in a search listing. Thus, although this system may not be at par with Google’s ranking mechanics, it still plays a vital role in making your website authorized and reputable.

Because search engine ranking and DA work differently, it implies that a penalty from your search engine will not necessarily reflect the DA ranking of your site. This is evident in instances where some websites are under a search engine’s penalty but still retain a good DA ranking. A search engine crawler will typically take into account about 200 factors about a website before ranking it whereas a DA ranking depends on only about 40.

There are ways to increase your DA ranking which are quite similar to search engine optimization. Just like in SEO, optimizing your website for DA may not immediately enhance your ranking. However, it does pay off eventually. Also note that the algorithms employed in DA ranking follow specific patterns; as you move up the rankings, it progressively gets harder to attain a higher ranking. Moving from ten to twenty is easy but making the leap from seventy to eighty is not.

Factors affecting DA

• External links to your site
• The quality and relevance of the external links
• The relevance and quality of your content
• The reputation and popularity of your site on social media
• The on-and-off-page search engine optimization of your website

What all this means

Just as it is imperative that you consider a website’s Google ranking before you consider incorporating your business into it, you also need to evaluate a website’s DA. Thus, even though DA ranking is not as comprehensive as a search engine ranking, it remains a significant element in website ranking.

Nevertheless, DA’s growing popularity will see it attain the same level of importance as search engine ranking. DA’s advantage is that it uses fewer factors to rank a website which enables you to focus your efforts on fewer parameters to enhance your ranking. Thus, when the site’s Google ranking drops; it could be due to any of a plethora of factors that you’ll need to troubleshoot whereas when your DA’s rank is affected, you’ll only need to scrutinize only a few elements.

So why do you really need to build your DA?

1. To Enjoy a Higher Ranking in Search Engines

DA is among the most significant metrics employed by search engines to rank a website. While a search engine is crawling and indexing a site, DA is one of the key parameters reviewed by the search engine. It will use this rank to determine the popularity and authenticity of your site.

2. To Enjoy a Higher Page Rank

A site that has an already established DA is rewarded with higher page ranks than those with less influential DAs. Also, the battle for top slots in page rank charts is intensifying with every passing day. Thus the need to build better authority is growing too as this is what will give you an edge over your competition.

3. Because it is doable

No one said building a reputable DA is an easy task, but it is not a herculean task. Increasing your DA will take a lot of time, work, and patience. This is because, as a site owner, you will need to follow the processes of deep linking and link diversification to convince the search engine’s algorithms. Diversified links which emanate from high authority websites are typically well rewarded by Google. Also, internal linking is significant as it informs Google that your site provides high-value content to its users by referring them to various pages within the website.

4. For a Successful Online Business

Once you have successfully built a superior DA for your website, your business will benefit from high visibility, an increase in search engine rank, and a wider audience base. The earned trust from both search engines and users is well worth the effort, resources, and time spent on building this DA.

A lot of businesses nowadays are handling their business online which heavily relies on websites. Therefore, a tool that can tell how reputable and popular a particular website is of great significance to marketers. This is the best attribute about the DA ranking as it gets the results after analyzing the external links of a website in addition to being able to tell how popular the site is on social media.

Being ahead of your competition is what can help your business to grow even in a highly competitive environment. Having a strong Domain Authority could just be the edge you needed.