Understanding Domain Authority – The Basics
If you are the owner of a website, you would do well to understand the meaning of the term domain authority and how domain authority applies to your website. Even nontechnical types should understand this important concept, given the impact it can have on the bottom line of a business.
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority, also known as website authority, is a ranking, or score, given to a website that indicates how well the site ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs). This score quantifies just how relevant and authoritative a website is. Domain authority is ranked on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 the highest score possible and 1 the lowest. Experts commonly agree that a domain authority score of 80 or better is a very good score indeed one only the top, most trusted websites receive.
Domain authority takes into consideration the strength and quality of your website’s SEO as well as how likely your site will rank in search results as a function of your SEO. The stronger your SEO, the higher your domain authority, the higher your ranking on SERPs. The SEO experts at Moz* developed the concept of domain authority and its corresponding scores.
Caveats Regarding Domain Authority
- Do not view domain authority as the means to determining how well your website is performing based on your own SEO; instead, use domain authority as an indicator of how well your website stacks up against the competition.
- Your domain authority score is not a static number; as you update and change the content on your website, blog, social media, etc., your domain authority score will also change. Remember, SEO factors into the score, and new content implies a variation in SEO.
How Is My Website’s Domain Authority Determined?
Domain authority is determined based on multiple factors and components. The most basic include the following:
- The number and quality of the links on your website – fewer high-quality links always ranks better than a large number of links of poor quality
- Other website links – includes both those that link to yours and how many you link to – links should be to/from trusted sources and never to spam or illegal sites
- The quality/relevance/value of the content on your website as it pertains to your industry – high domain authority sites like long-form content, video, and infographics and also content that can be shared and linked
- The quality of your technical SEO, which looks at factors such as overuse of keywords, site speed, if images are optimized, use of heading tags, etc., to ensure the compatibility of a website with how well search engines can crawl the site and index and rank the information on it
- The overall structure and how user-friendly a website is
- People liking/sharing/commenting on site content on social media – website owners should share content on their own social media sites and provide links for others to do the same; include social media icons with all web content to make it easy for readers to like and share it
Various online tools are available that let you determine the domain authority score for your own website. Additionally, you can check the average score for your industry overall – information that is helpful if you want to know if your site is on par with the competition or if it is lagging far behind.
Do not underestimate the value of your domain authority. Some consider it to be the most accurate measurement available for determining how a website ranks in search engine results which is the ultimate determinant of how much organic web traffic you receive.
If you want to learn more about domain authority or what you need to do to improve your domain authority ranking, Perfexion, Inc. can help. The professionals at PERFEXION understand domain authority and SEO and provide a full range of website audit and consultation services for their clients. As a Philadelphia-based web design and development company, PERFEXION stays abreast of all the latest changes in the industry and wants to keep their clients up to speed as well.
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* https://moz.com/