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Domain Authority as Website Quality Metric

by SEO Savvy August 12th, 2014

Domain Authority (DA) is a website quality score first developed by Moz as a holistic measurement of your site’s important SEO metrics. The greater your domain authority, the higher the quality of your website and the more likely it is that your site will rank in organic search. However, given all the changes to Google’s search algorithm, including the push towards semantic search, is domain authority still an important SEO metric?

While it may not be the final word on your site’s ranking potential, domain authority is a very useful gauge to analyze the quality of a website. Below, we’ve answered three basic questions about domain authority so you can better understand what the numbers mean for your website.

1) What is domain authority?

“Domain authority” is a quality score that roughly determines how well a website will perform in organic search results. Fundamentally, domain authority is meant to approximate how competitive any given site is for ranking well in Google search results. Since Google takes a variety of different factors into account when calculating organic search rankings, so too does domain authority. Domain authority is measured on a scale of 1 to 100; the higher your score, the stronger your domain authority and, by extension, the more likely it is that your site pages and content will rank in Google organic search.

2) Does domain authority matter?

Yes. Even with Google’s recent algorithm changes, domain authority is a valuable metric for analyzing site quality. Since domain authority is made up of an aggregate of different metrics, it’s an important view of your website’s overall quality and SEO performance. A low domain authority score means you have to improve the quality of content and backlinks to your website as well as improve on-page optimization. Quality is the key and that takes time and effort to build into a website. For example, if you are still looking for shortcuts to organic rankings and obsessing over the perfect keyword density, or buying spammy low-quality exact match anchor text backlinks, you may want to rethink this. Your DA score will thank you later.

3) How can I improve my website’s DA?

First of all, it’s important to keep in mind that it is extremely difficult to gain a DA number of 100. Only the most popular of sites, such as Facebook and Google itself, are able to do so. Second, unlike some metrics, like page views, conversions or visitor time on site, domain authority is difficult to influence quickly with a single tactic. It is a holistic view of your website’s quality.

Keeping this reality in mind, you should ensure that all your technical on-page SEO is in place. This means that your site URL structure, meta tags, header tags, alt image tags, internal linking and keywords are working in harmony with one another. Once your technical SEO is strong, focus on generating quality links through the creation of linkable content, also known as content marketing. Nothing has a more direct impact upon domain authority than having plenty of amazing, original and highly sharable content that is linked to from multiple

3 Ways Social Media Can Drive SEO

by SEO Savvy May 13th, 2014

From Twitter and Facebook, to Pinterest and Instagram, social media engagement helps to build brands, boost sales and drive SEO. YouTube, a social platform, has become the second largest search engine, bigger than Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL combined, according to Social Media Today. Business leads generated via search engines have a 14.6% close rate, compared with 1.7% for direct mail and print advertising, according to Search Engine Journal. And companies that generate more than 1,000 Facebook likes also receive nearly 1,400 website visits each day, according to HubSpot.

It’s not enough to just have great optimized content on your website anymore. Ignoring the importance of social media in leading users to your site can be detrimental to your business. If you want more traffic from search, you need to understand how social media enhances organic rankings. Here are 3 ways you can improve search traffic through the use of social media:

#1: More social media traffic equals more organic traffic.

When it comes to Google’s search algorithm, there’s a correlation between an increase in the traffic your website receives from social median and the more organic traffic it then receives. Though, this may be a bit of an oversimplification, the connection between the two makes sense. For example, when your customers like, tweet, or share your latest blog post via social media, this interactivity signals to Google that your content is relevant and useful. Continued interaction via social media will help your site rank higher in Google search results.

#2: Websites that make content easier to share rank higher.

Understanding both the ways and reasons that people seek and share content is key to reaching new audiences. Highly shareable content builds relationships, credibility and trust, while also adding value. According to research conducted by the New York Times and Latitude Research, 94% of people who share social media content carefully consider how the information they share will be useful to their followers, and 68% of respondents share to give a better sense of who they are and what they care about.

What does this mean for your business? Create content that aims to be thoughtful, interesting, insightful and useful. Create content that answers your customer’s questions. Highlight the problem your business solves for the customer, and show what makes you stand out from others. Take a position and add your own insights to industry news. And by all means, be sure to take advantage of plugins that make it easy for website visitors to quickly click and share your content.

#3: Google authorship establishes authority and credibility.

Google Authorship is a quick, easy way to boost online influence while driving clicks and conversions and establishing one’s online authority. “Author Rank” is the concept that an author can build brand recognition, trust and industry authority based on the content they publish online.

Google Authorship in SERPs

The idea is that the more quality content you publish in a specific niche that is consistently shared through social media, the higher that content will rank. Authorship, as seen in search results, leads to more exposure as an expert in your industry.

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