Table of Contents
Introduction
Backlinking is exactly what it sounds like – a link (URL) that redirects the user to content on your website. Backlinking forms the backbone of any good off-site SEO strategy; this study by Ahrefs highlights that almost 44% of the top-ranking websites on Google contain backlinks.
The concept is simple – if another website is linking to content on your website, then it must mean that the content on your website is worthy of referencing/citation on other sources. Believe it or not, Google views this factor as an important one while deciding your search engine results page ranking. Search engines view this referencing as something that improves the “authority” of your “domain” in the context of the subject involved. If you are putting together an SEO strategy right now, it may be a good time to look for a professional link building company to help you tap into this world of SEO.
Top strategies That Improves Your Website Authority
Let’s now delve into some great strategies that help you improve your domain authority using backlinks.
Build Content for Backlinks
Most of the website owners completely miss out on the importance of backlinking; Ahrefs established that over 66% of the pages have no backlinks. Start with publishing quality content on your website that focuses on solving the problems of your niche. Better yet, publish quality content that solves the problems of your consumers (in your niche, of course). This gives other websites reasons to link back to yours – and helps you boost your domain authority score in turn. When you have relevant information on your website, others will link back to it, given time.
Add External Links
Improving domain authority has a lot to do with external links coming into your webpage from other credible sources, says Moz. Such pages rank relatively higher than the ones with fewer inbound or outbound links.
One way you can achieve this is by finding a suitable partner for mutual benefits from backlinking. Send out emails to other businesses you wish to work with, and see if you can get them to publish content that links back to your website – and if you can do the same for theirs.
Check Link Quality
When trying to improve your domain authority, adding/buying a lot of backlinks in bulk may actually work to hurt your score. Any scaling (up or down) in backlinks sends red flags flying in search engine algorithms and must be avoided. Rather than gaining 50 links of questionable quality, it is better to retain 10 backlinks that are high quality and come from equally credible sources. It is also important to check that the backlinks to your websites are free from black-hat SEO flags.
Guest Posts
If your business is the kind that can create a lot of content, it is also likely that guest posting can be effectively leveraged to boost domain authority. Start by selecting a few websites you would like to guest post on, and check their domain authority and page authority, what length of posts they usually make, who reads their posts, and whether you like their content in general or not. Once this due diligence is out of the way, you can approach them for guest posting.
Check Your Domain Authority Score
Domain authority score is a score between 1 and 100 that tells where your website stands in terms of this metric. The higher the score, the better the domain authority. It can be easily checked using one of the many tools available online – some for free, others for a fee. A good domain authority score is somewhere between 50 and 60, above which your website is deemed to have excellent domain authority. The score shouldn’t dip below 40, which is the lower limit of an average score.
Improve Domain Authority Score
The only trusted and tested way to improve domain authority score is to steadily improve the health of your website’s overall SEO – on site or off site. Ensure there are good quality backlinks coming in, that you are using the right keywords, that your website architecture is structured optimally for the crawling and indexing engines, that there are local attributes for your website, etc. Purchasing backlinks in bulk and erecting an empire overnight is only going to confuse the search engines. So, even if the process is slow, keep your SEO spick and span.
Conduct a Link Audit
Not all backlinks are the same – they all have their individual source and character. It is important to assess the quality of the backlinks coming into your website. You can use an online tool (often for free) to assess which websites are referring to yours using links, whether or not the links are valid, whether they are follow or no-follow, and other quality attributes. Since backlinks hold the power to sway your search engine result rankings, it is necessary to let only the high-quality ones link back to your content.
Conclusion
Domain authority of your website is, quite ironically, not in your control, in a way. External links are required to help you boost your domain authority – but this is a highly dynamic metric, and things can go up or down any day. It is best to be responsive in your approach in dealing with backlinks for booting domain authority.