How To Increase Domain Authority
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DA is a minefield. I had no idea until this year that it could fluctuate so much. Last year, once I found out about DA, mine was steadily increasing month on month. This year the opposite happened.
I went from being in the mid 30s to 28 from December to March. It seemed the more I tried to increase it, the lower it went!
Luckily this month it's gone from 28 up to 33. In this blog post I'll share how I *think* this has happened.
Read on for lots of tips that could help to increase your domain authority of your blog.
Now, I'm no expert and I really don't totally understand it at all, but I'll tell you what I've been doing as it may have helped.
(Or it may not at all and next month who knows, my DA may just disappear altogether. Is that possible? I hope not.)
Why worry about DA at all?
I see so many arguments about this very subject all over social media between bloggers, SEO agencies and PR companies.
I'd love to not worry about it, but unfortunately many companies offer greater opportunities for bloggers for those with a 'high' DA only. Once I dropped to 28 it meant I wasn't considered for campaigns requiring 30+ DAs.
When your blog is your main income you need all the good opportunities you can get, so having a good DA becomes crucial.
As you can probably tell I'm no expert, but I read what I can and here's what I think has upped my DA by 5 in a month:
4 quick tips to increase domain authority
1. Remove broken links
I will hang my head in shame as I had never done this! Oops! Apparently it can really affect your score. I had over 100 dead links so spent a whole afternoon finding them and removing them. Quite a lot were from bloggers leaving their blog URL in comments and now their blog no longer exists. It's a boring time consuming process, but a must. I'll do it once a month now and it won't feel like such a chore! Search Google for a dead link checker to find a free tool to check your site.
2. Reinstate my home page
I had a moment where I was going to remove my home page. I thought it was a bit pointless. I didn't remove it, but deleted all the text. I asked Twitter whether they thought home pages still had a purpose and luckily everyone said yes, so I kept it. Thing is I only had two images on it for a long while. I then read something saying internal links and information on a home page is held in high regard as it should explain what your website is about. So I rewrote my homepage and included lots of juicy internal links to all of my websites main topics.
3. Increase back links
This is one of the hardest things to know how to do as a blogger, but I have secured quite a few links from others this year. I'm always up for being interviewed and offering tips/captions for blog posts so I keep an eye out on Twitter/Facebook for these types of opportunities. I've also written a couple of guest posts, but must find the time to do more. I've no idea if placing ads with other bloggers helps, but I've placed a few and it's always nice to support other bloggers with their advertising options. They're often great value and you'll meet some wonderful bloggers.
4. Add internal links
I've been painstakingly going through my blog posts one by one in the hope of improving them both for my DA and SEO purposes (another minefield). I've around 600 blog posts and I've gone through around 120 so far. Hopefully it's worth it! I'm moving my first image to below the first paragraph, instead of the first photo being at the very top of the blog post. This ensures the text is crawled first and not the image. I'm rewriting some of these intro paragraphs or creating them from scratch if there isn't one.
I'm trying to include some key words in the opening sentences. I'm adding 2-3 relevant internal links per blog post. I'm also making sure each blog post is at least 300 words. Most are, but there were a couple that aren't. This is a mammoth ongoing task which I hope I'll get through soon! A few blog posts a day is my aim. I've read quite a lot that internal links can boost SEO and good SEO can boost your DA.
Hopefully these four straightforward tips will help!
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