How to Stay at the Top of the Page Authority Ladder
8 min read
Understanding Page and Domain Authority
Want to improve your website authority with google? Moving up the authority rankings is about gaining trust with Google, to do this you need to make sure that the information on your site is relevant and engaging, remember keeping the customer intent at the forefront of your mind.
What is Domain Authority and Page Authority?
You might be wondering what Domain Authority and Page Authority both are? Domain/Page Authority score is not a new phrase in the world of SEO, but there are many bloggers who are unaware of domain/page authority and its significance.
The domain authority of a website describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry. This relevance has a direct impact on its ranking by search engines, trying to assess domain authority through automated analytic algorithms.
Domain Authority and Page Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale), there is a wide range of tools that you can use to predict how well a website will rank on search engines.
You could use Domain Authority when comparing one website to another or tracking the “authority” of your website over time. Authority links are links from websites that have established a substantial degree of trust and authority with search engines as a result of their age, quality, and size. Authority is a somewhat subjective concept.
Why is Domain Authority and Page Authority Important?
Domain Authority and Page Authority are both important parts to ensuring your website rank well with Google. The Domain Authority is important because it influences how your entire domain ranks on search engines.
This ranking can determine whether or not people can find your website. This score will help you also understand the credibility of your site in the eyes of search engines. You can use this to see how you differ from the fierce competition and improve rankings accordingly.
Link building is important when it comes to improving authority. Increasing your domain rating will also have a knock-on effect in causing people to want to link to you more. A link from a website with high authority is worth more than a link from a site with little or no Domain Authority. If you appear in relevant search engine results in your Your Domain Authority will increase naturally.
Page Authority is a holistic score and difficult to influence directly. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics that each have an impact on the score. This multi-factorial dependence is intentional: Since Google takes a lot of factors into account when ranking a page, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors, as well.
The best way to influence a page’s Authority is to improve its link profile. This can be accomplished by getting external links from other high-authority pages, which in turn act as “votes of confidence” for the authority of your site.
So How do You Improve Your Domain Authority?
Your link profile is the most important metric of all. Websites that have a strong, clean profile of links will have a higher DA score than websites with a poorer link profile. Heres a list of what’s important when link building:
- You want links coming in from websites with high authority
- Making sure that the links that are coming in are relevant and relate to your website
- There are no toxic links or low-quality ones
- There are a number of unique domains
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
Here are some important facts you will need to consider:
- Make sure you optimise the Meta titles to work with the Optimise the descriptions and the content in your website
- URL structure and SEO optimized permalinks.
- SEO Optimizing your images, videos, and other media elements
- Using keywords naturally in your content (no keyword stuffing)
- A very powerful SEO technique is to add internal links to your content
- To increase your chances of ranking in googles features you should format your content
- Remember the biggest factor is to ensure you have quality relevant content! This is important for both on-page and off-page SEO.
*Google is keen for you to keep the content the most up to date it can be and unique*
Some essential SEO settings that you should include are:
- Register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools
- It’s important to also create and optimise your .xml (an extension of a file) sitemap and then submit this to Google
- It’s a good idea to check your robots.txt settings and use Fetch as Google, it’s important that you do this so search engines can crawl your website with no issues
- If you haven’t already done so you might want to migrate your website to https
- Having a secondary navigation scheme that reveals the user’s location in a website or Web application, this is called a breadcrumbs
Setting up .hreflang=”x” link which is an attribute is an HTML meta element which specifies the language and optional geographic restrictions for a document. It can be used to interpret and clarify the lingual and geographical targeting of a website.
Believe it or not but having a mobile-friendly website is mandatory. There are a number of reasons for this, around 60% of users have moved away from desktops and now surf the web using mobile devices
Users are more likely to start a search on a mobile device before continuing the search on a desktop Google also ranks your website on the mobile-friendliness so don’t get left behind.
More importantly not having a mobile-friendly site will have a negative effect on your overall Domain Authority. Ideally, you want your page to load as fast as it can as this is one of the ‘signals’ that Google ranking algorithm will look for. If your website loads faster this will give you an advantage over other slower websites.
Improving your page speed will not only improve your rankings and domain authority but it will make the user experience better and this translates to more sales, leads, and signups.
re importantly not having a mobile-friendly site will have a negative effect on your overall Domain Authority. Google has often said that Social signals are not part of its Google Ranking algorithm, however, referring to a webpage’s collective shares, likes and overall social media visibility as perceived by search engines. These activities contribute to a page’s organic search ranking and are seen as another form of citation, similar to backlinks. Google has often said there is there is a clear correlation between pages that rank high on Google and social signals. For example, if your pages have many likes or shares tend to be popular on google!
Below are some tips on improving your social signals:
- Post daily: Keep your brand at the top of social media news feeds.
- Use images: Images greatly increase interaction rates for all social media types.
- Listen: Hear what people are saying about your brand and respond to critique in a constructive and positive way.
- Monitor: There are several free social media marketing apps which track shares, re-tweets, likes, and keywords associated with your brand.
- Contests: contests and giveaways are a great way to increase interest in your brand.
- Partnerships: Share links and produce original content with other popular brands.
Cover all the social media bases: Produce content for all of the top social media sites.
They say patience is a virtue, as I mentioned in the introduction of this post, increasing your domain authority is not something that can be done overnight. It will take time for googles spiders and bots to crawl and to read and evaluate your website after you make any of the above changes, so you need to be patient.
*Working systematically on improving your Google rankings will also have a positive effect on your domain authority score*
How to Improve your Page Authority
Good, fresh content is the best way to assure a good Page Authority score. As previously mentioned, it all starts with good content.
You need to create high-quality content that is relevant to your brand, and you need to post new content on a regular basis. The better your content ends up being, the more likely it is to be shared, commented or liked by readers – and the more likely other sites are to link to your page. For example, if a website posts a link to one of your blog posts in an article, then their audience will be exposed to your brand, which can help bring more web traffic to your site as well.
Obviously, the higher quality the site is that links to your pages, the higher quality the traffic will be. Additionally, external links from high-quality sites are considered a strong indicator of quality – something Google deems incredibly important. Earning external links couldn’t be easier, follow these simple steps:
- Write GREAT content! Without this, you aren’t going to get very far!
- Get yourself on social media, promoting your content will help you get more social signals, and the more exposure you get the better!
- Make sure you link to other authoritative sites, these sites will take note of the fact that you are sending them traffic and will often return the favour by linking to your site as well.
- Last but not least, writing guest blogs for other sites within your industry is a good way to earn external links while also building brand authority to boot.
It’s important to understand what the users intent is, this will allow you to improve the customer experience. Take a look at our blog on the Skyscraper 1.0 and 2.0 techniques for more information. Using images on your website will increase user dwell rate and will have a good impact on your Page Authority, images make content more readable.
- Large blocks of text can be somewhat overwhelming to many users, adding images into the content can help break up the text, making it user-friendly. It also can help your user to scan the content to see if its a page that they want to stay on. The images need to be relevant to the content, it will provide some context for the user. Users are more likely to share the content also when there are images included.
- When posting the content onto a social media page having imagery will help the post stand out for the rest! It’s more appealing and engaging to a user! Therefore the post is more likely to be read.
- Using imagery will work in your favour, Google sees the use of images as a compliment, however, if you don’t add descriptive text Google won’t be able to understand what the images are.
Make sure that you use strong SEO keywords in this ALT text so that your images can be found on Google’s search engine, thereby improving that page’s ability to generate more traffic. So there are the steps to improving the DA and PA, you might notice that some of the steps are similar. In a nutshell, page authority is now just as important as domain authority, work on great content and backlinks! Googles algorithm is changing, it’s now just as important to have the right content on your page!
Go on – Give it a go!