What determines online authority? For most websites, domain authority determines online authority. Domain authority is a logarithmic scale that measures quality of a website based on points. The higher the points, the better quality the given site is considered. For starters, it is easy to progress from a low score to a higher one, but it can be a challenge for small websites to progress to high domain authority unless extra SEO strategies are applied.

What is Considered Good Domain Authority?

On a scale of 1 to 100, a good authority can be 30 points and above, leaving high 70’s to 90’s to the big brands, government websites, schools websites and news websites of course. For a small business websites, 30 to 50 points considered good since search engines can see them as authoritative sites.

Below are the important factors that search marketers should consider.

Befriend the Robots

Create a robot friendly website by making sure that search engines can easily see it, crawl it, index it, and understand all the information in a website. Since robots don’t see the websites as people, it is crucial to ensure that search engines can read and understand what the website is conveying.

Here are different things to keep in mind when creating a robot friendly website:

1. On page optimization

Be sure to optimize all title tags with the most important keywords followed by the brand name. Next, optimize the site based on keywords that are specific to a each page. For example, if you have a page about a car wash, only use keywords that are related to that topic throughout the page.

On page optimization goes beyond landing pages. It is applicable to the whole site including the blog posts, press releases, videos, info graphics, images, and animation.

2. XML Sitemaps

Create and submit XML sitemaps to search engines to ensure that the site is properly getting crawled and indexed. This is important especially for the sites with regular updates.

3. Create robots txt files

Give directions to robots on how the site should be crawled and indexed. These files will let robots know whether you want them to disregard certain pages, or direct them to other pages instead. Here are some examples of robot files:

• Robot txt for site indexing: Tell search engines to index the whole website. For example, User-agent: * Allow: /
• Robot txt for not indexing some pages: Telling search engines not to index some pages that are meant for public eye. For example, the login pages to the website will look like this: Disallow: /wp-admin/
• Robot txt code telling crawlers not to index the whole website will look like this: User-agent: * Disallow: /
• 301 redirects: Tell the search engines to ignore the bad link and go to the other page.
• Follow and nofollow: Whether you want to give credit to the links used in the site or not, this code will tell the search engines which links to give credit to in a particular page.

Websites are for People

After making sure that the back end of the website is well taken care of, it is also important to ensure that the site can easily be accessible by the visitors. This includes the language used and the user experience.

• Content: Unique content is still the king; Discover your voice and provide the information that aligns with your target audience’s expectations. Creating great content based on your audience needs is crucial, and making that content sharable is a plus. In depth content will always attract new visitors and keep the regular visitors waiting for more.
• Social media presence: This is all about making connection with clients, future clients and fans. Social media provides a great opportunity for businesses to connect directly with the audience and talk about their services and brand in general. Social media is also a good option for brand reputation management.
• Link earning: Links play a big role when it comes to improving authority. Build relationships with other related websites, blogs and news sites to gain online authority. Getting links from one high authoritative website might just move any site from bottom 20 to high 30. Even though it is not an easy task, link-earning is absolutely worth the effort.

Things to remember

• Always try to get links from higher domain authority than your site.
• Great links comes from .edu sites, news sites and .gov sites.
• Links within your industry are more credible.

4. Join directories: Local directories increase online visibility and help with local marketing strategies. Some directories act as back links while others just boost local SEO and increase brand visibility and traffic to the site.

5. Offline marketing: Businesses should do more than create websites. Brand awareness comes from things as simple as sponsoring a local event, product giveaways, community donations, or being a speaker on a community gathering. This all goes hand-in-hand with the website.

Improving online authority can be very easy when the SEO strategies are done properly. All efforts to improve domain authority come down to maintaining equal balance between presenting to the search engines or robots and serving the targeted audience.

By: Naima