How to Increase Website Authority (Domain Rating)
How to Increase Website Authority? You may have come across many posts that suggest that a website’s ranking can be improved by increasing the website’s authority. Though it is true, that the authority of the website plays an important role in increasing the ranking, it is not the only required factor. There are several other factors included that help enhance the rankings of a website.
A common mistake that people make while improving the rankings of SERP is that they put all their focus on increasing the score of a website by any means to make it authoritative. However, if they put their attention on adding high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites, they can make their website more beneficial for others and also create authority for it.
In this article, we’ll be covering some important aspects that will help in making your website authoritative. We will be learning about what website authority is, how it is calculated, and what is the right and efficient way of increasing it. So let’s get started by first knowing what website authority is?
How to Increase Website Authority: What Exactly is the Website Authority?
Website authority is also referred to as domain rating and is a metric of SEO tools. It helps in measuring the strength of a website’s backlinks in comparison to all other websites in their index. The authority metric of any website is scaled between 0-100.
The score is dependent upon the calculation of data through various algorithms. Higher the authority score, better it is for the website.
However, getting a high score is much more challenging than getting a low score. You must have the knowledge to know how to make improvements in your backlinks that can affect the authority score of your website.
Calculating the Website’s Authority
Before jumping into action, it is always wiser to first know what you are dealing with. Prior to improving your website’s authority score, you should first know how the Domain ratings are calculated.
1. Number of Websites Linking to You
All the good SEO tools have a metric that can calculate the number of websites that are linking to your site. Most people believe that the higher the number of referred domains, the higher the rating.
Well, that is only partially true, the quality of websites that are linking to your website determines the increase in the rating of your domain. Links that are coming to your website that are sponsored and have no-follow attributes don’t contribute much to improve the authority of your website.
However, if the majority of links that are coming to your website are coming from a single source, it won’t be useful for you.
2. The DR Score of Linking Domains
The DR score of a domain is extremely crucial in determining the quality of your website. Getting hundreds of links from a low-quality site is extremely easy, but doing that won’t be beneficial for your site in any way. Hence, when calculating the DR score of your website, the DR score of the sites that are linking to your website is also calculated.
To put it simply, sites that have a high DR score and are backlinking to your website are more beneficial in making your website authoritative. There is another advantage of getting backlinks from sites that have a high DR score.
Sites that have good DR scores are always trying to improve their authority, and therefore, as their authority increases, it puts a positive effect on the authority of your website too. You should look out for sites that have the potential to create quality content on their website. Even if their DR score is low, over time, they tend to achieve a much better score.
Now the question is, how do you check the potential of a website? The very first thing you need to check is the quality of the content they have published on their site. If the quality of content is high, naturally, they will attract a larger audience over the period of time.
Secondly, you can check out the growth of the links they are using on their website. Tools such as Site Explorer provides insights into the link growth by providing various graphs to the user.
3. The number of websites each referring domain links to
There are a variety of factors that contribute to efficient backlinks. One of the essential factors is the number of websites that a referring domain is linked to. When two websites have the same DR score, then it becomes hard for you to pick one of them.
In such a scenario, DR equity is checked. DR equity is determined by the number of unique links the website is referring too. The two sites that have an identical score are compared on the basis of the uniqueness of the links they are referring too. It helps you pick the site that can contribute more to the authority of your website.
How to Increase Website Authority: Increasing your Domain Rating
To put it simply, create more followed links to your website and the score of your website will increase. Yes, it’s as simple as that. You only need to keep one thing in mind, there is no benefit of getting links from a website that has a poor domain rating unless it has the potential to grow in the coming years.
Another important thing worth considering is that the backlinks that are referring to your website must be targeted on the pages that you want to rank in the SERPs. When backlinks refer to random pages on your website, there isn’t much affect on organic rankings.
The number of referring domains linked to a webpage is more closely related to organic traffic than the DR of the ranking website. Creating links for your webpage isn’t an easy process, and you’ll face various challenges for building the links that further help in building the authority.
To increase the authority of your website, you can use the following ways:
1. Create Beneficial Content that People Will Love to Link to
To create beneficial content, it is essential to take care of the given attributes.
Non-Commercial
All SEO marketers know how hard it is to get links to affiliate reviews and sales pages. It shows that a large number of people are likely to link with pages that are informative and not just a means to earn money.
Helpful
For creating useful content, there are two methods. The first way is to build something that provides utility such as calculators, blog posts, and other free tools. The second way is to create content with genuine and correct citations. Content that refers to articles that are published on popular and authority websites have high citability.
Content that has a good history of backlinks
To check the history of referred backlinks, you need to first install an SEO toolbar. Ahrefs provides a good SEO toolbar. On this tool, search for the topic that you have a content idea for, and check the number of referring domains for the best-ranked pages. A topic that has a high number of links usually determines the topic to be link-worthy. Also, remember to skip the topics that are obsolete and are not being searched anymore.
You can check out the Keyword Explorer to find the most trending topics in any particular niche. In the tool, look out for the seed keyword and then check out the All Keywords report. It will provide you with multiple potential ideas that may win you a lot of traffic. However, you may have to add words like what, who, why, when, guide, how, to the Include filter to effectively filter the topics with high citability or utility.
Lastly, filter the keywords having high Keyword Difficulty score to get the best topics that have a good history of getting links. Keyword difficultly is generally based on the number of linking domains to top results. Therefore, pages that rank for high keyword difficulty have lots of backlinks.
2. Go for Authoritative & Relevant Websites
Everyone loves to follow good and useful websites, provided they are visible to the users. So, it’s essential for you to reach out to people and tell them about the website. For reaching out to the relevant people, you can target the following audiences.
- The people that are featured in your article.
- People who have written in the same niche about similar topics.
- People that have linked to articles on the same kind of topics.
3. Use Internal Links to Improve the Authority of your Website
Internal linking is an extremely helpful tool to improve the authority of your website. You can create useful and informative content and then link those webpages with the other pages of your website that you want to rank in the search engine. This is also known as the Middleman method. It helps in building authority to webpages that you wish to rank.
Wrapping Up
The most essential thing to remember while building authority for your website is focusing on creating high-quality backlinks from the authority websites to your webpages that you want to rank in the SERP. Focusing on the links will let you stay determined in finding quality content, which inevitably will help your site build authority for itself. Remember, ranking on a search engine is not just determined by a single parameter and is a combination of various elements together.