Link Building and Domain Authority Basics (and 6 Ways to Increase Domain Authority)

hey what's up this is zach with root and branch group and in this video we are going to be looking at what domain authority means and how you can increase it for your website there's five key items that we're gonna go through first one what does google want in seo let's orient ourselves with that then we'll talk about what is domain authority and we'll look at three different of the seo platforms moz semrush and hrefs we'll talk about the concept of link equity and how that relates and we will talk about follow versus no follow links finally we'll wrap up with six ways to increase your domain authority and seo potential on your website so first thing what does google want what is the general idea with seo search engines like google they're constantly on the lookout for the best content content that is useful and unique and relevant on the most trustworthy sites so the most high authority sites to answer questions that users have why right what are google's motivations well each successfully answered search query leads to a repeat visit and continual monetization on the platform there's you and me a user we're effectively just giving our money to google when we keep using google we are more people in the ecosystem who can be monetized so what is this domain authority thing domain authority is a 0 to 100 score that's used to represent site trustworthiness and authority so it's a it is determined by the number and value of inbound links pointing to your website from external sites it's all about those links as your site gains valuable inbound links it increases in authority as we'll see not all links are created the same but the most valuable links it's all about those really high value links domain authority is important because it's generally predictive of seo ranking potential a site with higher domain authority has more potential so if there are two websites trying to rank for a similar keyword theme they both are about to put out a brand new piece of content targeting the same keyword if a new piece of content on a site with a domain authority of 50 that piece of content is going to have it's going to outrank all things being equal the same piece of content on a site with a domain authority of 40. the different seo platforms have different proprietary calculations and slightly different names for calculating this domain authority so let's check those out moz moz calls it domain authority they actually are the ones that pioneered this metric semrush they actually call it the authority score and hrefs hrefs calls it domain rating i really like ahrefs i've used all three of these platforms i still use moz and hrefs this is what um looks like on ahrefs there's the root and branch site with a domain rating of 24. speaking of root and branch if you like this kind of seo google ads google analytics tag manager kind of tips and training content please feel free go ahead and subscribe if you like this so all three of these moz semrush and ahrefs all of these things domain authority authority score domain rating they're all zero to 100 scores that measure the strength of a website's backlink profile backlink being that's the same thing as an inbound link pointing to your site from another site and that's going to measure things like the total number of domains that are sending a link to your site the total number of links in general the relative domain authority of the domains sending the inbound links and that's going to lead us to link equity links are a measure of trust and you can really think about them as the currency of seo search engines use links as a proxy for measuring trust so when when one website chooses to link to another it's essentially vouching for the trustworthiness of the site it's saying to google hey google i trust this website enough that i'm willing to potentially send users from my site to this site so google go ahead and transfer some of my good name that i have with you and pass it on to that other site it's this measure of trust a handshake agreement between sites so the that general idea the idea that links past value is called link equity sometimes it's referred to as link juice it's the reason that links from more trustworthy domains are worth more than links from sites with a lower domain authority there's just more trust that is already built up with google in a high domain authority site so if that domain then chooses to pass a link to another site it's worth a lot more than it would be if it was less regarded in the eyes of google this same general idea actually applies to internal links so any links on your own site that go from one page to another in general you should be thinking about your highest value pages the ones that have the highest page authority they should intentionally be linking to your most important pages on your site such as where your customers will be likely to convert give those really high value conversion pages all the link juice all the link equity they can get so let's check out some quick examples on the root and branch site so this is a screenshot of some of the backlink profile of the root and branch site this is actually data from moz and you can see if you look at this second column from the left there's this da that stands for domain authority and it's the highest value links pointing to the root and branch site from other sites so you can see there's actually a link for moz with a domain authority of 91 there's a link from pitt.edu with a domain authority of 89 there's a link at the bottom from marketingsherpa.com the domain authority of 64. these are all really high value links from from sites that have high domain authority and as such it's going to be really valuable in helping the seo potential of the root and branch site at the other end of the spectrum we have some domains you can see with a root with the domain authority of you know seven from webworld.pw or six from webrank.pw second from the bottom these are going to be much much much less valuable than the high domain authority links in terms of increasing our seo opportunity and ranking potential now here's a further twist in addition to links not all being created equal because some come from higher domain authority sites and some come from lower there's another twist that not all links pass link equity it's actually possible to instruct search engines to refrain from passing link equity and this is why we need to understand the difference between follow versus nofollow links so before we do that let's just say do valuable links really matter let's check out google search console to see organic search performance for the root and branch site over the last 16 months so all the way on the left side of the screen here we can see you know june 27th of 2020 looks like the blue in the graph here is clicks so somewhere between two to five clicks a day and the purple on the chart is measuring impressions how often things are showing up in organic search so over the past year and a half this site's gone from two to five clicks a day to now where we are in late october 2021 somewhere between 150 to 200 clicks a day so a massive increase in organic search performance and the predecessor to a lot of that there was a really high domain authority link that started pointing to the site on august 18th of 2020 and then another one on november 20th of 2020. so as you can see those two link events preceded a lot of the ramp up in organic search performance now these certainly were not the only things that happened but they were a key part of the overall ecosystem that led to this increase all right so let's talk about follow versus nofollow links by default all links will be follow links and they will therefore pass link equity remember search engines use links this is their their proxy for measuring trust and these search engines generally assume you won't be linking to a site if you don't trust it right you're linking to it there's some handshake agreement there they want to assume that there's trust there but it is possible to add a nofollow value to your links if you don't want google to consider it so here's an example of what that would look like let's say we wanted to link to this blog on local seo versus national seo and this is this is what we want to write this is a great blog about local seo cool this is a just a great blog this is what the standard link would look like in the html this is a great blog about and you can see href there's a link and the anchor text that precedes that that a at the end of this html says local seo that's a standard link that's what's going to look like it doesn't say do follow in there it's just assumed that it's going to be a followed link but let's say we got a nofollow link from somebody who didn't really maybe they didn't really like us didn't trust us this is how they might set up that link and you can see there's this rel value that says nofollow so that is how to set up a nofollow link generally um at least in my opinion you don't need to worry about them but a lot of times unfortunately especially if you're doing some kind of link outreach um you're trying to earn links for your website which we'll talk about how to do that shortly if you're not careful you might end up finding that sure you can get a bunch of links but the people who are giving you links they might all put in this rel nofollow which is not going to help you as much so what's the takeaway what is the takeaway this link juice transfer this link equity transfer from external websites they can be either followed links or no followed and we really like these we really like these followed links the no follow ones on the right it's not that it's not helpful for us at all it's just they're much less helpful so the recommendation here is for any link building work pr guest blogging ask upfront to confirm you're working for a followed link and not going to get a no follow link all right and that leads us to the final part of this little talk how can you get more links and increase your domain authority six ways to do it first and most importantly just create really really good content if your content is awesome most of your links will come about naturally as people discover it so make people happy with your content answer their questions make sure your answer is better than any other answer on the internet for the specific thing that you're writing about another idea which is less important than number one and if you don't do number one it's not even worth thinking about the other five so make sure you do number one but number two participate in local events and sponsorships they often come with links just by accident as the event does promotional activities and outreach that's number two number three monitor your mentions online so you can do this with a platform like moz for example where you will find out hey your business or your service you guys were mentioned online but you didn't get a corresponding link maybe someone wrote a blog or an article about you but they didn't actually link to your site these are really great opportunities where you can do outreach and request a link you could email the webmaster and say hey i saw that you mentioned me online thanks so much would you mind putting a link to the home page as well might be really helpful for your audience the people that are on your site reading about that and a lot of seo tools in addition to mods can help you monitor these mentions and try to turn them into backlinks number four be on the lookout for guest blog opportunities as mentioned generally you want to make sure that they're going to be followed links but guest posts these guest blogs they can be great ways to increase brand awareness and also increase seo ranking potential that's number four number five my least favorite personally i don't really do it but it is possible to do link outreach you can find publications that generally seem to cater to the same types of audience that you have on your website and you can make your case to them that hey you have some content that you think would be really helpful for their audience so you can do that outreach on your own there are ways to do this to try to narrow it down you can look at links that your competitors have that you don't have and hypothesize that hey these might be publications that would be willing to link to me as well but yeah this is going to be a pretty manual process a lot of emailing generally a pretty low hit rate i don't do it myself personally but it is number five here on this list number six i love it's harrow help a reporter out and what harrow is it gives you an opportunity to send targeted outreach to reporters that are looking to write an article about something that you might have a perspective on so the way to do this just google hero sign up and you'll have to create an account with your business but once you do that you will get an email once or more than once a day with all of these potential opportunities to contribute content might just be a quote might be a brief snippet they might ask you to write a guest blog but instead of just doing willy-nilly outreach you have a really targeted list of people that are very much looking for something that you might be able to contribute and as you can see some of the publications here you know number 64 here the small business home gift guide that would be a link from real homes if you happen to represent a fashion related business number 62 is a link from glam number 63 if you're doing something related to pet adoption there would be a link from fox news so every day there's an opportunity to look through and say 80 to 90 different potential things that might be a fit for you so that that's number six on the list thanks for watching this video and yeah if you have any other suggestions things i i missed maybe feel free drop them in the comments thanks so much bye

Channel: Root & Branch Digital Marketing

Views: 108

Keywords: link building in seo, domain authority in seo, domain rating in seo, semrush authority score, follow vs no follow links, how to increase domain rating, how domain authority impacts seo

Id: H43K0cTT5T4

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021