SEO: what is domain authority?

Domain authority (DA) is an effective way to determine the quality of your website. The higher your authority in your field, the greater your chances of ranking high in search engine results. Note that they use your domain authority to guarantee the quality of the content you provide to the Internet user on a specific subject. If you are able to present good content, you are sure to have good domain authority. You thus optimize the ranking of your site.

Definition of domain authority

For beginners in the field of SEO, it is important to clarify that the domain authority is an indicator created by the Moz site, specializing in the SEO referencing. It aims toindicate the authority of a site in a domain, but also to determine its ability to rank well in search engine results.

Thanks to the DA, it is possible toassess the likelihood of a website ranking on search engine results pages. The score is between 1 and 100. The higher score indicates a greater facility to be positioned at the top of the page. This score can also be used to compare several websites or to track the ranking of the same site over time. For this purpose, it is possible to obtain the domain authority of any website through the extension "MozBar" on Google chrome. Moz's "Link Explorer" extension and several other software also use DA to perform analyzes.

Although various tools are readily available today for calculating AD, judging the results and knowing what to do with them remains a matter of experts. Indeed, the best way to create a SEO strategy remains the use of a specialized agency. You will find for example on the Osmova agency website various examples of services that will improve your visibility on the internet.

How is the domain authority calculated?

In general, the calculation of domain authority is done by Moz.com, although there are also other sites that are starting to offer these analyzes. Many parameters are taken into account in order to evaluate the AD. The criteria are varied and in the majority of cases, they are not communicated. However, they mainly concern:

• the total number of sites that redirect to the domain name or backlinks,
• the credibility of sites pointing to the domain name,
• the age of the domain name,
• the number of pages on the site.

Note that the domain authority is linked to the authority page. The latter measures, among other things, the credibility of a web page.

Why is domain authority important in SEO?

Previously, Google would just rank web pages instead of ranking sites. SEO experts then followed the PageRank provided by it (algorithm that measured the popularity of a site). These days, in addition to your referring domains, Google also assesses your site's overall reputation. It therefore considers not only your reliability, but also the content of the page in question. For this purpose, in the case of very competitive requests, a considerable DA will be necessary in order to move up your page in the rankings. This will give you a better chance of landing on the first page of the search engine.

Note that it is only from 50 points that one considers that the authority of a domain of a site is strong. Also note that the scale from 0 to 100 is logarithmic. To this end, it is easier for a site to gain 10 points between 20 and 30 than between 60 and 70. As and when your site will gain in power, it will become more and more complex to earn additional points.

How to improve your domain authority?

Ideally, it is advisable to use a digital agency to improve its domain authority as part of an SEO strategy. However, if you have some technical knowledge, know that you can carry out some steps of this project yourself.

Services offered by agencies

Obviously, the domain authority is mainly used to compare sites. Be aware that some consultants also use AD as a key indicator for their clients. The domain authority then constitutes a means of measuring the notoriety of a company on the internet. To this end, agencies specializing in SEO help you to facilitate the necessary steps in your project.

SEO services on the web offer in particular to completely create your site so that it is conducive to a high DA. The professionals of the agencies indeed have a broad and technical vision of the trades of the Web and Web marketing as a whole. They are responsible for developing web applications to help you with your SEO and support you in your process with sound advice. On the one hand, they take care of analyzing the structure of the site and its content. On the other hand, they take care ofoptimize the code of the site structure as well as off-page factors. All of this helps improve your AD. So do not hesitate to get information from an agency to learn more about the steps to adopt in your strategy.

Steps you can take yourself

Here are seven steps to improve your domain authority that you can do yourself:

• improve your off-page SEO,
• optimize your on-page SEO,
• work on your technical referencing,
• adapt your website to mobile devices,
• boost the speed of your page,
• increase your social signals,
• be patient.

The domain authority helps you in particular to improve your referencing. As you optimize your DA score, you will gradually see the impact of your work on your website.

Un high AD score shows that you are on the right track in your SEO strategy. This does not mean, however, that you will get better rankings or better traffic. Also, a low domain authority score does not indicate that your website will not rank well on Google. The DA is only a prediction. So be sure to create a website that meets SEO guidelines search engines. You will find that over time you will get solid positionings.