Domain authority is a useful metric to determine how well your website is performing compared to competitive sites. But we must also emphasize that it is not an official ranking factor for Google. So what does that mean? Should we still strive to improve it?
If you have similar questions in your mind, then you’re in the right place. By the end of this article, you’ll understand what exactly domain authority is, why, and how you can improve the domain authority score of your Joomla site.
Sounds good? Let’s get started.
What Is Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is one of the ranking factors that determine where your website will rank in the search engine result pages. It is developed by a company called Moz to tell us how well a website should rank, using a 0 to 100 scale.
It predicts how likely a domain is to appear in the SERPs compared to its competitors. The higher the DA, the better chance it has to rank, in theory.
Several factors determine your website’s domain authority, such as:
- The number and quality of your site’s backlinks
- The quality of content on your website
- The popularity of your domain on various social media networks
- The performance of your website in search results
Is Domain Authority Important
Does domain authority actually matter? Simply put, there’s a direct correlation between high domain authority scores and higher rankings. Although it’s not necessarily a metric used directly by Google, it’s still one of the important metrics SEOs use to gauge how valuable your site is.
It’s not the be-all or end-all of SEOs, but it gives you a reference to how well your website is performing. Therefore, if you want to grow your SEO rankings, you should consider improving your domain authority.
How Is Domain Authority Calculated
Domain authority can be easily calculated using the Moz Domain Authority tool, a quick, free tool that will show your domain authority score.
All you have to do is create a Moz account to use it and it’s free for ten lookups a month. Once you create an account and look up your site using the Link Explorer, you’ll get a lot of valuable information like your Domain authority, Linking Domains, Inbound Links, and Ranking Keywords.
If you have a new site or you run a small business website, your domain authority score will be very low. But that should not concern you. Compare the score against your competitive websites to get a better idea of how your site is performing.
How to Improve the Domain Authority
While this article focuses on the ways to improve your domain authority, don’t obsess with the score. Use it as a baseline to determine if your efforts to increase domain authority are paying off.
Improve Domain Authority Through Backlinks
Backlinks, which are links from other websites to yours, affect your domain authority. Sneaky redirects and bad backlinks can get your site banned from search engines. Make sure the links to your website are valid and free of any black-hat SEO tactics.
The first step is to get rid of bad backlinks because a lot of low-quality irrelevant backlinks will only harm your rankings. Here’s a tool from Moz where you can check your site and its links to sort the bad ones out.
The next step is to add good links. Reach out to businesses for mutually beneficial partnerships and do guest postings on other sites to get more exposure. Your content marketing strategy also plays a crucial role in increasing your domain authority. Consider writing blog posts on your websites if you don’t already. The more content you create regularly, the more likely your DA will improve.
Optimize Your Internal Linking
Have you ever noticed how brilliant the internal structure of Wikipedia is? An excellent top-down structure that is fully optimized for search engine crawlers and keeps site visitors engaged is the key here.
You need to create a menu structure for your Joomla site that is optimized for passing link juice. Also, if you write blog posts, you can link every post to 2-3 others posts on your blog.
Here are some of the best strategies to follow for internal linking:
- Add internal links wherever it helps your readers
- Place links in the body of the page rather than the header or footer
- Link from new to old and from old to new pages
- Link from pages with high traffic to pages that have high conversion rates
- Use anchor text in the text of the link
- Fix broken internal links
Make Your Site Relevant
Relevance or query relevance is the consistency of users’ queries and your website’s content. When a user finds their query relevant to the title, URL, and meta description of your site, they are most likely to click it.
Perform consumer analysis, get to know your audience, their concerns, and their intent. When you know your users’ intent, you can use the right words/queries to find the relevant keywords.
Once you find the keywords, it’s time to put the right keywords in the right places to make your site relevant. Use keywords in the page title, content, H1 header, image alt tags, and your meta description.
Remember not to overstuff your content with keywords. At the end of the day, you want your content to make sense to your users and not only to search engines.
Improve Your Page Load Speed
Who doesn’t love to browse fast websites? Well, Google loves it too and made page load speed one of the factors to determine your site’s rank.
There are plenty of tools available to check the page speed, such as Google Page Speed Tool, WebPageTest, Google Analytics, Lighthouse.
Here’s a quick checklist to follow to work on speed optimization of your Joomla site.
- Choose a reliable Joomla Page Builder
- Use Joomla templates optimized for speed
- Enable Gzip compression on Joomla
- Compress and optimize images before using them
- Enable Joomla caching
- Enable Server caching
- Use Content Delivery Network to serve content
For a detailed guideline, visit HERE.
Master the Art of Social Media Marketing
If you have a well-optimized website with great content and still not getting the reach you deserve, you probably haven’t mastered the art of social media marketing yet.
Social signals are a big ranking factor, and you have to promote your content and engage with the audience to improve your domain authority.
Here are a few things to keep in mind to get more social signals.
- Set goals and plan strategies that are relevant to your business
- Research your target audience and set KPIs
- Promote your content with engaging social copy
- Be consistent with your social presence
- Assess what’s working and what isn’t to keep improving
Wrapping Up
Domain authority is an important metric and surely improving it propels your business forward. But also remember it’s a comparative metric, the score on its own means very little. So instead of sweating on the score, focus on the improvements that can be done.
Follow the steps we mentioned in this article and when you do, your domain authority will rise. As well as your site’s ability to rank well in search engine results. Good luck!
