Ways to Boost Domain Authority for New Bloggers

A few years back, I started writing for websites with no idea what I was doing. It was just a way to earn extra cash. But to improve as a writer, it’s crucial to know how analytics affect your blog. Today, let’s discuss the impact of Domain Authority Building on website metrics and understand a few ways to boost domain authority as a new blogger.

Domain Authority: What is it?

For starters, let us know what domain authority is. Domain Authority or ‘DA’ is a website metric developed by Moz. In the most basic terms, you can think of DA as a comparative metric of your site based on other sites in the domain. For example, a site having DA of 80 will rank better in a search engine than a site of the same domain having a DA of 70. Thus, the more the DA that you have, the better your site/blog will rank.

Why is DA important?

This is one important question. As a budding freelancer, I used to think why domain authority building would be important for me. At the start, I would never give a thought to these metrics and just worked on the tasks given by the clients. However, for bigger things to happen, you need to have a sound understanding of these metrics.

DA is important because it tells you how much authority you have over that domain. A higher DA score simply means that your site is more competitive than the others in the same domain. Building your DA helps you feature in the top rankings at Google search and this helps in building up your profile as a content creator.

Factors concerning DA

Moz states that there are a lot of factors that are taken into account while calculating the DA of a site. Because of this, you cannot possibly influence the DA of your site directly. The most lucrative method of improving this metric would be to improve your overall SEO. On page SEO and even offline marketing of your brand can have a positive effect on the DA.

Another major factor contributing to DA is backlinks (dofollow). In order to improve the DA of your site, you must build a strong link profile where you have backlinks from sites that already have high domain authority. However, do not engage in spam in order to get links, as this will get your page blacklisted on Google and other search engines.

How is content and DA related?

As a content writer, freelancers often find themselves writing blog posts and articles for client website. While writing, you come across keywords which are to be used to make the content SEO friendly. Now, since the content is targeting SEO, it is very important for the content to be original and offer some value to the visitors. A site that offers something valuable to their visitors is preferred by the visitors for obvious reasons. Furthermore, quality content lets you build up a loyal audience base. This loyal audience base is likely to share your content over the social media and get you the backlinks from sites like Facebook that substantially help in improving your domain authority.

So, in practice, you can very well see why content is important for authority building. In this competitive digital space, not having a content marketing strategy in place will simply lead you to oblivion.

How to build DA?

Getting onto the most important question now, how does one build their domain authority?

Now, as we are aware that overall SEO and a good link profile are important for DA. While SEO is more of a technical work and can be done by an SEO expert, writers have the command over content and they can use it to build up a strong link profile.

So, here is a step by step guidance on how you can start building up your domain authority:

1. Sound technical SEO: This contains everything within SEO. Your tags, headers, Meta tags, keywords, alt tags, site structure, URL, navigability and so on. SEO and content marketing are complimentary to each other and it is very important to have a sound technical SEO in place before one can venture out for DA building. As a writer, I do not have knowledge about technical SEO. In such cases, I would take the help of web developers who understand the technicalities and help me in building a site that is sound in technical SEO.
2. Creating high quality content: As a writer, your task is to create content that offers high value to the readers. In other words, your content must be linkable. Mere content is not enough in this highly competitive digital market. Deep research and thorough understanding of the topic in hand is very important for developing high quality content. Read as much as you can, participate in discussions with experts and develop your own perspective about a topic before creating content. The more original you are with your approach, the better your work will turn out to be. If you want your site to be on the top, create content that is engaging. The linkable content is what drives your rankings and helps you create a good link profile.
3. Work on internal links: A very common mistake made by people is to forget internal linking. While you’re out creating a strong backlink profile, the internal linking of your site gets overshadowed. This must be avoided at all costs. Internally linking your relevant content together can benefit both the search engines that are indexing your website and the users who come looking for information. The more content you produce, the more you can link. With a powerful internal linking profile, you can build a strong, interconnected network.

Apart from these three steps, you must keep refreshing your link profile from time to time in order to remove the bad links. Spam and links from shady websites lower your credibility and must be removed as soon as possible.

Finally, if you’ve done all of this in the correct way, then your DA must be improving. However, the age of your domain also plays a factor and thus you must be patient. There are no shortcuts in the journey to building DA. The process is an ongoing one and you will have to work constantly in order to maintain the authority that you’ve built.