Whether you operate a brick-and-mortar business in the real world or have a company that exists exclusively on the Internet, having a high-traffic website is going to be critical to your success.
We’ve crossed the line, and there’s no turning back.
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People are flocking to the Internet and bringing their credit cards with them, so if you want to succeed in this increasingly digital world, your website needs to get traffic and lots of it.
One of the keys to getting traffic is ranking well in the search results from Google, Bing and other search engines.
To this end, search engine optimization has become one of the fastest growing industries in the B2B world.
Chances are good that you yourself work for an online marketing company or are looking to hire one to provide you with excellent SEO services to put your website on the front page of Google.
Well, one of the key things that SEOs look at is website authority, at both the domain level and at the individual page level.
Increasing page and domain authority are crucial for improving web traffic.
What Is Page Authority?
The term and concept were coined by the folks at Moz.com as a way of determining how individual website pages are likely to rank in Google’s search results.
An algorithm is used to determine page authority, taking into account over 40 different ranking factors.
Page authority is measured on a scale of 1-100, but pages are not scored in a linear fashion.
As a page moves up in authority, it becomes exponentially more authoritative.
So improving your page authority from 20 to 21 is a whole lot easier than increasing it from 70 to 71.
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is just like page authority, except that it measures the strength of the entire website as a whole.
The ranking factors that determine its domain authority are essentially the same as those for page authority, and they include things like the age of the site and internal and external links.
Domain and page authority, however, do not take into account things like keyword density or topic relevance, so having a high domain authority or high page authority in itself does not guarantee rank.
On occasion you will find certain pages that outrank others due to their high authority rather than topical relevance, but that is becoming very rare.
How To Increase Page/Domain Authority
To get more traffic to your company website, you need to increase your authority and rankings in the search results.
Here are three things under your control that you can focus on to accomplish that.
Create Content
It all starts with content. Content is still king, as it always should be. But how do you produce viral content?
You can’t force people to share it, right? That’s out of your hands.
But you can put in the work to create content that is worthy of going viral and gaining links due to its pure awesomeness.
That should be your goal with every piece of content that you publish.
However, there are some types of content that have been found to attract links and social shares more consistently than others.
The types of content that are most likely to gain organic links are how-to posts, list articles, infographics, videos and original research (e.g. case studies).
Build Internal Links To Target Pages
After starting with great content, the next thing you can do to increase page authority and ultimately domain authority is to create internal links to guide visitors to more and more useful content deeper within the site.
Start with pages on your site that already have good page authority, and then link from those pages to both older and new pages to pass some of that link juice through to the other pages.
Not only does this provide great SEO value, but it just makes sense to provide more value to your website visitors.
You work so hard to get new readers to your site, so make sure they have a lot of options once they get there.
Keep them on your site for as long as possible, offering them more information, more content and more value before they click away to somewhere else.
Build External Links To Target Pages
This is where most of your website’s authority is going to come from.
Backlinks from other websites act as votes of confidence, showing the search engines that your site is something special and that people should go check it out.
But all backlinks are not created equal. Links that come to you from other sites that are themselves high-authority sites are ideal.
And you also want those sites to be relevant to your own in order to send strong, positive signals to Google and friends.
Links coming from strong, authoritative, relevant sites within your niche are going to help improve your website’s authority more than anything else.
Promote It
With all the emphasis on manual link building, some small biz owners and even some SEOs seem to forget that truly great content builds its own links and simply needs a big push to get it going.
So even if you’re hiring an SEO company to boost your company website’s page and domain authority, don’t forget to do your part to help your content gain some traction.
Here’s How:
- Share it through all your social channels
- Link to your company email and newsletter when appropriate
- Feature your best content on your homepage or in the sidebar
Page Authority Vs. Domain Authority
So which is more important in terms of improving search engine optimization and increasing targeted web traffic?
Both are important, and the two go hand-in-hand, but there are benefits to focusing on both.
If you are providing SEO services for a new client and need to pull in some quick results for them, then it would make sense to focus on improving page rank, especially for a landing page that is optimized to convert well in terms of gaining leads, acquiring new subscribers or making sales.
But ultimately, improving domain authority is going to be more valuable in the long term, so you’ll have to spread your efforts to boost the domain as a whole too.
As domain authority rises, it improves page authority across all pages on the site, so boosting domain authority is a better strategy in the long term.
