How to improve your blog's domain authority and win work
Blogging

How to improve your blog’s domain authority and win work

When I first started blogging I had no idea what domain authority was or what it meant for a blogger as I wasn’t monetising my blog at the time. However now that my blog is in fact my business, my domain authority is quite an important factor to me.

What is domain authority?

In a nutshell domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well your website or blog will rank on search engines result pages, and there are over 40 factors that contribute towards your score. Every single website will initially start with a domain authority of 1, and this score will increase as certain tactics are put in place and could go as high as 100.

If you’re a blogger who is looking to monetise your blog, many brands and companies will ask you for your domain authority. The higher the better as this will provide your with more opportunities and a bartering tool to negotiate a higher fee. Generally as a blogger a domain authority of over 30 is considered good, which is what I have found from my own experience. So I’m sharing my top tips here on how to increase your domain authority.

Have your own domain

Having your own domain is the very first step in having your own domain authority. If you’re a blogger who currently has wordpress.com in your web address, this is not your own domain. Your domain authority may seem high, but that is because it is showing the domain authority for WordPress rather than for your own site. So with this in mind it is best to have your own domain (i.e http://thepramshed.co.uk) as soon as you can, to enable you to start building up your own domain authority.

Focus on link building

One of the ways that your domain authority is calculated is by the number of back links to your blog on higher ranking sites. Therefore it’s really important that you work towards getting links to your blog on other sites especially influencer sites, and there are many ways that you can do this. For family and parenting related blogs you can tweet @mumsnetinfluencers and @babycentreUK in the hope that they feature your blog post on their site. In addition to this you can sign-up to Bloglovin and make sure that all your blog content is automatically posted there. I’ve noticed when I check my domain authority that Bloglovin is providing back links and is a much higher rank site than mine.

Another way of getting back links to your blog is to participate in Facebook groups where other bloggers are crowdsourcing for information. In return they will feature your comment and include a link back to your blog. This is a quick and simple method of boosting your domain authority, plus it will show that you are active in the blogging community as well.

Write guest posts for other bloggers

A brilliant way to increase your domain authority and also to help other bloggers if they are needing content is to offer your services of guest posting on their blog. By doing this your blog post will be published on their site, and that blogger should always include a back link to your blog. If you are thinking of doing this it is best that you consider writing a guest post for a blogger who has a higher domain authority than you.

Quality content

It’s also so important for you to be featuring quality content on your blog that is relevant for your blog and your target audience. Having been blogging for over two years now, I know just how hard it can be to write new content and how easily you can loose your blogging mojo. However fear not, if you get stuck you can always refer to affordable Blogger Outreach programmes such as Content Mother who can support in content creation and content marketing for you.

Remove or update broken links

Every now and again run a broken link checker on your blog, and you should be able to download a plug-in that allows you to do this. Once all your broken links are found either update or delete these. Having broken links on your blog will ultimately impact on your domain authority. So, if you are in the process of spring cleaning your blog, make sure that this is top of your agenda.

In addition to this there are some other points to take into consideration when growing your domain authority.

  1. Your domain authority is calculated by a a number of factors (there are more than 40 in total), so if there is an update to one of these factors your domain authority can rise and fluctuate. With this in mind it’s best not to get too hung up on your domain authority especially if it falls, as you may find that it increases again in the next crawl.
  2. Once you have your own website domain your domain authority will not instantly increase. Be patient here as you will need to wait for the next crawl, or maybe the next crawl after that before you see the numbers increase.

Domain authority shouldn’t be the only factor you take into account when presenting yourself to brands, although many brands want you to high DA. If you haven’t quite got the domain authority for a particular project then where else do your strengths lie. Have you got a particularly large following? Is your niche relevant for the brand? Have you got a good engagement rate? All of these factors may help you to win work if you are monetising your blog, not just domain authority alone.

I hope that you have found these blogging tips useful, and that your domain authority increases as a result of putting some of these into use.

Claire x

How to improve your domain authority and win work

This is a collaborative post. 

 

 

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