If you are a startup trying to digest everything you need to know about ranking your website on Google, all that you have learnt will be boiled to the following: high quality content, number of backlinks, and optimum mobile use experience. The reason why they are important is because they somehow represent the online behaviour of users. They read content, they follow links out of a page, and they are mostly using their phones rather than laptops or PCs.
However, there is one other element that we are sure you keep seeing in various articles: the domain authority of your website.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority was coined and developed by leading company in digital marketing tools and strategies called Moz. They were able to create a tool that determines a domain’s ability to rank on the search engine results page. A website’s domain authority score depends on the following factors:
- On page optimisation – considers the website’s metadata, use of keywords, and overall structure.
- Content – the credibility of the content being published and the website’s ability to provide users with sufficient information about the brand, their products or services, and their expertise.
- Backlinks – the number of trusted links that redirects users to your website.
- Domain name – a part of your online identity that has to relate or connect to your brand.
Each of these factors, if done right, can strengthen your current domain authority.
Improving Your Domain Authority
Create a Relevant Domain Name
It is hard to balance the need for uniqueness for a domain name when you still have to make sure that they are easy to remember. There are lot of workarounds for this problem. One would be using your company name as the domain name – this is an ideal way to make sure all your marketing efforts are working towards strengthening the retention around your company name. However, if they are too difficult to say or remember in the first place, you might want to consider just choosing a name related to your industry or field; you can even use a phrase or word that can easily be associated to your company (like Nike’s ‘Just do It’ or McDonald’s with ‘I’m Lovin’ It’).
Make Sure Your Website is Optimised
There are a lot of on-page efforts that ensures your website is optimised.
- Content – This does not just cover your articles and the use of keywords across all pages. It also includes meta data (from title tags to alt tags), robots.txt, breadcrumbs, creating the right funnel, and so on.
- Speed – Just like with content, you have to include factors such as the image size, web hosting, graphics and effects, even the overall design in ensuring your website loads fast.
- Internal linking – Link old articles to new ones. This allows you to create a path for your users, showing them related articles that they may want to check out.
You will notice that while content is usually the writer’s domain and the speed is usually the designer’s concern, the SEO will still need to dip their hands in each factor to ensure that while the writer and the designer are pushing their own efforts, the SEO will not be affected.
Choose The Appropriate Web Hosting
There are three kinds of web hosting to choose from, and each has their own advantages.
- Shared web hosting – You and other users share a hardware system which allocates sufficient disk space for you. However, if one of the websites is overusing the hardware system, your website’s performance may suffer.
- Dedicated server – You will have your own processor system and more than enough power for your website to use. But it is the more expensive option, too.
- Windows VPS hosting – You can enjoy the best of both shared hosting and dedicated server at a cost efficient price. A hardware server is divided into virtual machines which has its own data center rack space, processor power, and RAM.
Your choice of web hosting can affect your website’s overall speed and performance. So evaluate what you need to improve on your website now and choose the appropriate hosting.
Creating Shareable Content
Simply put, you need to be able to churn out high quality content that people will not hesitate to share on their pages. Even better, if other writers from authority websites are linking to your content as well. So make sure that you are able to think up unique or interesting topics, and turn them into shareable articles or infographics.
Mobile-Friendly Use of Your Website
More often than not, and for a lot of practical reasons, people choose to access online content on their phones. In fact, if your website does not load fast on mobile, they tend to leave it immediately without feeling the need to view their content first. So make sure you avoid losing an audience by making your website mobile adaptive.
Lastly, always promote your website on social media. Especially if you are a newcomer in your field or industry, your best bet at getting traction is by promoting your website on Facebook or Twitter incessantly.
Go back to your online strategies and see how you have addressed any of these factors. And remember to improve on them constantly as online behaviours change.
