What Is Domain Authority(DA) & Page Authority(PA)? – How to Increase It

If you are serious about optimizing your website for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, it’s important that you are aware of the concepts of domain authority and page authority.

These are concepts that can help you come up with realistic and effective optimization strategies. Many people also tend to think that domain authority and page authority are the same thing.

No, they are different from each other. Domain authority refers to the strength of the whole domain page while page authority is based on the strength of individual pages.

It was Moz, a software as a service company, that coined the term “domain authority”. It’s basically a score that predicts how well a website will rank in the search engines.

The score ranges from one to one hundred. The higher your domain’ score is, the more likely that your domain will rank better in the search engines.

To calculate the score for domain authority, you need to evaluate several factors. These factors include the number of total links that the domain has and the linking root domains.

There are tools that you can use to instantly determine the domain authority of a website. Such tools include MozBar, Link Explorer, and Keyword Explorer.

On the other hand, page authority is a score that predicts an individual page’s chances of ranking on the search engine result pages (SERP).

The score also ranges from one to one hundred. Individual pages with higher ranks are perceived to have higher abilities to rank for specific keywords.

Some of the factors that are considered when calculating page authority include the following:

1. The number of external links a page has.
2. The number of quality and relevant websites linking to the page.
3. The number of subdomains that link to the page.
4. The number of root domains linking to the page using partial match anchor text.
5. The number of root domains linking to the page.
6. Social signals such as the number of LinkedIn shares, Twitter retweets, and Facebook likes that the page has received.

Which Should Get More of You Attention? Domain Authority or Page Authority?

It is pretty obvious by now that domain authority holds more importance because if your domain has a high score, majority of your individual pages will get a boost in their rankings.

Putting your efforts in domain authority is better over the long-term. If done right and given enough time, it will reward you with more traffic and higher conversion rates.

The point here is that if you are to decide between domain authority or page authority, your choice should be on domain authority. It offers you better benefits in the long run.

However, I am not in any way saying here that page authority is not important. Page authority still plays a very important role in search engine optimization.

Although I would suggest that you spend more attention and resources to domain authority, you should not ignore page authority altogether.

You should also set aside some of your resources for improving page authority. The bottom line here is that both domain authority and page authority play significant roles in improving your site’s search engine visibility.

With that said, I would suggest that you pay attention to both of them.

Tips on How to Improve Your Site’s Domain Authority

1. Work on your site’s off-page SEO:

When it comes to off-page SEO, the most important metric is your site’s link profile. Your website will have a higher and better domain authority if there’s a lot of high-quality websites linking back to it.

To have a strong link profile, you must meet several requirements.

• One, you must have links from a good number of unique domains.
• Two, you must have minimal links from low-quality websites.
• Three, incoming links should be coming from websites that are relevant to your site.
• And four, incoming links should be coming from reliable and high-quality websites.

2. On-page SEO optimization:

This has to do with improving the pages and contents of your website. Always keep in mind that the quality of your content is the biggest factor that affects your on-page SEO.

With that said, you should start with creating the best possible content you can. The next step is to optimize that content using standard SEO methods.

Make use of keyword-rich titles and descriptions. Properly use headings in your content to break paragraphs into more digestible content.

Make sure that your page URLs and permalinks are optimized. And last but not the least, you should also optimize the tags and descriptions you use for images and videos in your site.

3. Work on your technical SEO:

Technical SEO is a term used to refer to the technical tasks you need to accomplish to make your website is as friendly as possible to search engine spiders and crawlers.

For example, you need to create a clear XML sitemap for your website and submit it to Google. This helps a lot in ensuring that Google crawls and indexes all of your site’s pages.

You should also register your website with either Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console.

4. Make sure that your website or blog is mobile-friendly:

Here’s something you should know. Mobile searches have now surpassed desktop searches. You will be missing out on a lot of traffic and opportunities if your website is not mobile-friendly.

Making your site mobile-friendly isn’t that difficult. In fact, a lot of content-management systems automatically do it for you.

To check if your website is mobile-friendly, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

5. Improve your site’s social media signals:

Social signals refer to the chatter on social media about your website.

These signals include shares and likes on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, mentions on LinkedIn, tags on Instagram, etc.

The only way to improve your site’s social media signals is to be as active as possible on social media. Always make it a point to engage with your target audiences in social sites.

Tips on How to Improve Your Site’s Page Authority

1. Remove bad links that are pointing to pages in your website:

Always keep in mind that links coming from low-quality sites can negatively affect the rankings of your individual pages.

You don’t have access to most of the sites linking to your websites so this is a manual process of directly contacting the other webmasters and politely asking them to remove your link in their sites.

2. Make sure that the contents of your pages are original, very detailed, and relevant to the needs of your readers:

At the end of the day, it’s the quality of your content that will matter the most in eyes of search engines like Google and Bing. Make sure that every page in your website are relevant to the overall theme of the website.

3. Focus on getting high-quality inbound links:

The more inbound links that a page in your website gets, the higher its page authority becomes. You should devise a backlinking strategy that aims to attract links from diverse sources.

Your links should come from a lot of websites, not just from a few sites.

4. Increase the social signals for your individual pages:

Just like domain authority, page authority also gets a boost if there’s a lot of social chatter for your pages.

You should integrate social media buttons in your website’s content so that visitors can easily share your pages on their social news feeds.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, domain authority and page authority are very important matters when it comes to optimizing a website for the search engines.

You should set aside the time and the necessary resources to improve your site’s domain authority and page authority.

The two concepts actually complement each other. Better domain authority improves the rankings of your individual pages. Page authority taken cumulatively can significantly boost your site’s overall domain authority.