How to Increase Domain Authority?

I wrote an article about domain authority and what it means for your website long time ago and ever since I got a lot of comments about how to increase it to rank higher in Google. Many of you have tried different techniques to influence the score but with no luck. I have to be honest and say I didn’t put that much effort into the domain authority of my own blog but ever since I noticed I do get a lot of traffic from my images that are indexed on Google, I decided to work harder on my SEO. I also find it challenging to build my own rank and show you how I’ve done it, so you can try it yourself!

So here it is, this blog post will be my first one starting the series on how to increase domain authority of your website. I will share with you the basic how-to tricks that I’ve tracked myself from various sources and test them with my own blog. I promise I will post more often on this topic and every time I find something interesting, I’ll try it right away. After a specific time period, let’s say 3 months, I will verify if they increased my domain authority score. I will test different hypotheses and prove you wrong or prove you right. Are you joining me?

Increase Domain Authority – Week 1

Here’s my starting point – I used to have a initial domain authority of 13. I upgraded a theme after blogging for 4 months and right now I’m at 18. My Alexa rank is 2712049 and SEMRush is 7416004 (you can find yours at SEOquake).

I run an SEO page diagnosis according to SEOquake and I got 2 errors and 4 warnings:

I also checked my website with SEO SiteCheckup and this is the feedback I got. You can also do a SEO scan of your website for free!

SEO SiteCheckup listed them in the order of priority:

So this is the list of the first errors I will fix on my blog this week to improve my domain authority.

1

Image Alt

This means adding an alt attribute to every <img> tag used into your webpage.

If you upload an image into your blog post, make sure you’re actually using the Alt Text field and not the Title. This is the mistake that I’ve been always making, that is filling in the title of the image. This is NOT the place that should contain relevant keywords – it should be the alt text.

Do I need to go through every blog post I’ve shared before and search for missing Alt Tags? No! With a short piece of code that you need to add in your functions.php file in your child theme, it will add all Alt tags to images that had a title tag filled in. Everything is done in a second! Just make sure you type this code:

2

Keywords usage

Your most common keywords are not appearing in one or more of the meta-tags above. Your primary keywords should appear in your meta-tags to help identify the topic of your webpage to search engines.

This means I need to add my most used keywords to the main page title tag, meta-description, and meta keywords fields. According to “Keyword density” analysis by SEOquake, my most used keyword is “facebook” and so I’ll add it to the relevant fields in my SEOYoast plugin in WordPress.

3

Canonical tags

Your webpage is using the canonical link tag. This means that your webpage is not the preferred one to use in the search results.

What does this mean exactly? Canonicalization means there is a possibility of duplicate content on your website – perhaps you have similar pages or even similar paragraphs cited on different pages of your website. This confuses the search engine as to which website it should redirect to. This is why canonical links are necessary for “duplicate content” – to make sure you tell the search engine which website to link to.

This meta tag isn’t new, but like nofollow, simply uses a new rel parameter. For example:

This tag tells Bing and Google that the given page should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL www.example.com/canonical-version-of-page/ and that all of the links and content metrics the engines apply should actually be credited toward the provided URL.

So what’s causing problem on my blog? Well, according to SEO SiteChecker, I have canonical tags implemented but have no duplicate content, which doesn’t show as a preferred website in the search engines. I need to remove the tag to solve this SEO error.

How to do it? It requires a bit of coding, but it’s easy! Just go to your backend and search for functions.php file in your child theme folder. Add this piece of code within the php brackets and hit save and refresh:

I added the Alt tags to the images of all the blog posts with a little help of coding. I also added the most popular keyword “facebook” to my meta tags and I removed the canonical tags from my site as I don’t have any duplicate content. Those were my first 3 points I improved to increase my domain authority! Have you tried them already? Did it work for you? Let me know what you think in the comments below!