Guide To Domain Authority & How You Can Boost It
What Is Domain Authority?
A domain is the address of your website. Its authority is based on a number of different factors and affects where it appears on search engine results pages. The better your website’s authority the higher up it will appear on search engines, which will mean more people looking at and searching within your niche are likely to see it.
Domain Authority vs Page Authority
Your website is made up of individual pages and those pages rank individually on search engine results pages as well as your website, or domain.
Therefore, although both are important, there isn’t much difference between domain authority and page authority and both are important to ensure that your website and the pages that make it up are as visible as possible to people searching for your products or services.
Best Ways To Increase Domain Authority
- Have quality content on your website.
- Include links to other pages within your website (internal links).
- Include links to other reputable websites (external links)
- Longevity – domain authority increases over time and page authority increases faster than domain authority.
- Backlinks, this is whether other websites link to your site and is possibly THE most effective way of proving to the search engine bots and algorithms that your website should rank well.
Domain Authority Tools and Scoring Systems
Domain Authority By Moz
Domain Authority (DA) was created by Moz, the software company that is all about SEO. Moz create tools and products which help with all aspects of SEO, and are used by SEO businesses all over the world, including Approved Business.
DA is all about where your website ranks in your specific niche according to criteria such as website and link quality and is a scoring system from 1 to 100. Your website’s score is comparative, that is your score is dependent on your competitors and how well your site ranks compared to theirs.
Domain Rating By Ahrefs
This tool and rating system was created by another big player in the SEO industry, Ahrefs. This scoring system is also from 1 to 100 but Ahrefs base DR solely on the backlink profile of a website and the pages that make it up. The backlink profile and DR score is rated on both the quantity and the quality of backlinks to your website.
Authority Score by Semrush
Another scoring tool, this time from Semrush, which focuses on backlinks, traffic, and organic search data and analysis. Therefore, a website’s Authority Score is a holistic overview of its quality.
PageRank by Google
PageRank is, in a way, a wildcard in this selection as although it is an SEO tool and one of the most important ones, it is not one that the public or even SEO specialists can use themselves. It used to be but Google removed it to prevent people relying on getting their Page Rank score higher rather than focusing on the quality of the content on their websites.
So, even though Page Rank is still a huge determiner for where your website will be on SERPs it cannot be checked. The same criteria still apply though to ensure that your website scores highly with PageRank and these are mostly to do with the number and quality of backlinks and the likelihood that they will be clicked on.
How Approved Business Can Help You
At Approved Business we use a combination of SEO tools, including those above, to gain a complete picture of your current domain and page authority and can help you to improve it with our SEO services. Click here to get a free SEO checkup and book a discovery call to help you to understand it.
