Category: Website Authority

Understanding Website Authority

Understanding Domain Authority – The Basics

If you are the owner of a website, you would do well to understand the meaning of the term domain authority and how domain authority applies to your website. Even nontechnical types should understand this important concept, given the impact it can have on the bottom line of a business.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain authority, also known as website authority, is a ranking, or score, given to a website that indicates how well the site ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs). This score quantifies just how relevant and authoritative a website is. Domain authority is ranked on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 the highest score possible and 1 the lowest. Experts commonly agree that a domain authority score of 80 or better is a very good score indeed one only the top, most trusted websites receive.

Domain authority takes into consideration the strength and quality of your website’s SEO as well as how likely your site will rank in search results as a function of your SEO. The stronger your SEO, the higher your domain authority, the higher your ranking on SERPs. The SEO experts at Moz* developed the concept of domain authority and its corresponding scores.

Caveats Regarding Domain Authority

  1. Do not view domain authority as the means to determining how well your website is performing based on your own SEO; instead, use domain authority as an indicator of how well your website stacks up against the competition.
  2. Your domain authority score is not a static number; as you update and change the content on your website, blog, social media, etc., your domain authority score will also change. Remember, SEO factors into the score, and new content implies a variation in SEO.

How Is My Website’s Domain Authority Determined?

Domain authority is determined based on multiple factors and components. The most basic include the following:

  • The number and quality of the links on your website – fewer high-quality links always ranks better than a large number of links of poor quality
  • Other website links – includes both those that link to yours and how many you link to – links should be to/from trusted sources and never to spam or illegal sites
  • The quality/relevance/value of the content on your website as it pertains to your industry – high domain authority sites like long-form content, video, and infographics and also content that can be shared and linked
  • The quality of your technical SEO, which looks at factors such as overuse of keywords, site speed, if images are optimized, use of heading tags, etc., to ensure the compatibility of a website with how well search engines can crawl the site and index and rank the information on it
  • The overall structure and how user-friendly a website is
  • People liking/sharing/commenting on site content on social media – website owners should share content on their own social media sites and provide links for others to do the same; include social media icons with all web content to make it easy for readers to like and share it

 

Various online tools are available that let you determine the domain authority score for your own website. Additionally, you can check the average score for your industry overall – information that is helpful if you want to know if your site is on par with the competition or if it is lagging far behind.

Do not underestimate the value of your domain authority. Some consider it to be the most accurate measurement available for determining how a website ranks in search engine results which is the ultimate determinant of how much organic web traffic you receive.

If you want to learn more about domain authority or what you need to do to improve your domain authority ranking, Perfexion, Inc. can help. The professionals at PERFEXION understand domain authority and SEO and provide a full range of website audit and consultation services for their clients. As a Philadelphia-based web design and development company, PERFEXION stays abreast of all the latest changes in the industry and wants to keep their clients up to speed as well.

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* https://moz.com/

Marry SEO Content and Marketing Strategies

Content Marketing and SEO Go Hand in Hand

Web developers have traditionally viewed search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing as two separate and distinct tools for driving qualified traffic to a website. More recently, however, that thinking has changed. According to entrepreneur and online marketing guru and influencer Neil Patel, “SEO is all about content marketing. And content marketing is all about SEO.” In other words, these two areas are not mutually exclusive; using one does not negate the need to use the other, and vice versa. In fact, SEO and content marketing need each other, and each should integrate the other.

To understand this, you must first be clear on what each area does individually. The job of search engine optimization is to make sure your website and web content are visible on search engine results pages (SERPs) when someone performs an internet search (through Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other search engine) for your service or product offering. On-page SEO activity is all the technical stuff you can do relative to keywords and key phrases behind the scenes of your website, while off-page steps you can take, such as social media, improve your site’s organic search results.

On the other hand, according to Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is “… a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” With content marketing, customers and prospective customers find the information on your website to be interesting and engaging, and useful in that it helps them solve a problem or fulfill a need. Your content marketing establishes you as an authority in the market and helps you build relationships and trust with customers. The objective of content marketing is to increase sales and drive customers to your online business who are qualified and likely to become repeat clients.

When SEO and content marketing combine/intersect/overlap/converge, etc., the results are powerful indeed. To achieve the desired results, the technical aspects of your SEO efforts must cross into your content marketing efforts, and SEO techniques should be applied as you implement content marketing – neither should be developed or applied in a silo.

How SEO and Content Marketing Combine Forces

  • Keywords: The primary component of SEO involves using the right keywords (including keyword phrases and long-tail keywords), plus tracking how well they rank in SERPs. Since long gone are the days of loading up a page of content with keywords and phrases that appear to have been combined by a robot instead of a human, web content must use keywords strategically in content that is well-written and relevant to the user.
  • Links and linkbacks: When the content you produce is good – really good – others will want to link back to it. Consider this: If other users or websites find the content on your blog to be relevant, interesting, and valuable, they will link back to it from their own site – a situation SEO thrives on. Let your content marketing specialists develop the content you need to attract attention and drive others to click on links to your site.
  • Fresh content delivers: Content marketing, with full attention to SEO, is not a once-and-done deal. Don’t think you can post amazing content and then sit back and wait for the results to pour in. For this dynamic to deliver the best results in terms of search engine indexing and ranking, you need to produce fresh content on a consistent basis – and ensure the new content is just as valuable and makes just as good use of SEO as the content that came before it.

The importance of content marketing combined with proper SEO cannot be overstated. Done right, your SEO strategy should mean your business is found organically online and your content marketing strategy engages users and converts them into paying customers.

If you would like to learn more about how SEO and content marketing can work for your business, contact the experts at Perfexion, Inc. Perfexion’s qualified professionals specialize in managing and maximizing clients’ web content, ranking, and search results traffic.

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Google Changes Ranking Algorithm Based on Mobile Website Readiness

Using Mobile-Readiness to Get Found on Google

Every so often, Google tweaks and refines how they return web pages in response to a search query. Google continuously assesses their search algorithms to make sure the results they provide are the most useful they can be based on the information input into the search query.

Understanding How Google Performs a Search

Without getting into the technical weeds about Google’s search algorithms and how they work, it helps to understand, in nontechnical terms, how Google performs a search and some of the information Google relies on when providing search results. One key factor that comes into play is the level of relevance of the content on a web page to the search being performed.

Google tries to determine how specific or broad a search is. For example, did the user type in cat or exotic Persian shorthair cat? Google analyzes the words a user types into the search bar, and even makes allowances for typos (cat bred vs. cat breed). And, depending on the words or terms a user included in their search (keywords), Google’s lightning-fast search for results includes looking at web pages and matching the keywords to web page content where they appear in titles, headings, and text.

A user’s personal Google search settings and patterns also inform Google and can come into play in helping Google return relevant search results. For example, a user’s previous or recent searches as well as their location can factor in the results Google returns to a search query.

Companies and website owners naturally want to be found when a customer or potential customer searches for a product they sell or service they offer. But, before Google will rank a website high in search engine results, they want to be certain that visitors to the website to have a good user experience. Businesses can help themselves in that regard by ensuring the content on their website is always fresh and the information they provide is of high quality and valuable to the people who visit their website. The business should come across as trustworthy, and the content on the site representative of a company that is an authority in its industry or on a particular topic.

Mobile vs. Desktop Search

Without a doubt, we have gone mobile. People everywhere rely on their mobile devices – smartphones and tablets – to shop, for entertainment, for conducting business, for learning and information, for communicating, and much more. As far back as 2010, industry experts predicted our use of mobile devices would surpass our use of desktop PCs. Those experts were right. According to a March 2017 report by comScore, 69% of the time we spend consuming digital media is done on a mobile device as compared to a desktop computer – and that includes performing searches on Google.

As a result, Google will be changing their optimization rules over time so that websites will only be ranked based on the mobile version of the website. Up until quite recently, it did not matter if a website was not optimized for viewing and use on mobile devices. In fact, countless sites continue to work today on only desktop computers and not on mobile devices. But, with every update to their ranking algorithms that Google performs, Google is moving away from ranking websites based on their desktop version to what they call mobile-first indexing, which ranks the mobile version of the site in terms of its content, links, certain data, and how viewable the site is on a mobile device.

Understanding Mobile-first Indexing

In anticipation of user behavior trends, Google has been slowly moving toward mobile-first indexing – a search ranking system that gives websites a mobile-friendly ranking boost. With mobile-first indexing, Google looks first at the mobile version of a website for indexing and for how they determine a site’s ranking. But, if a company has only a desktop version of their website, Google will still include that site in its index, but the sites rankings could be negatively affected.

In time, Google will no longer consider the desktop version of a website to be the primary version, but will instead give that preference to the mobile version of the website. To minimize the impact to your desktop site, you will want to ensure that your desktop and mobile sites are, in essence, created equal – that the desktop site uses responsive design and the content is optimized for mobile use.

Do I Need to Change My Mobile Site to Improve Indexing and Ranking?

There are ways to enhance your mobile website and prepare for when Google eventually makes the change to mobile-first indexing. First and foremost, the content on your mobile site should be just as high quality and valuable as the content on the desktop version of your website, whether you are using text, images, or video. Google should be able to both crawl and index all your mobile content. The key takeaway is to understand that Google will crawl mobile content, so content on your mobile website should be as relevant and valuable as possible, which ultimately serves to improve your rankings.

Other checks and updates you should make include, for example, the mobile site’s metadata and social metadata, structured data, XML, sitemaps, and more – to ensure you are using, tagging, optimizing, etc. versions of each that work within the mobile environment.

Companies can no longer ignore (or afford to ignore) the requirement to have a mobile-responsive website. In the past, a company created two versions of their website: one for desktop and another for mobile. Over the upcoming months, Google will rely more and more on a company’s mobile site or mobile responsiveness of a desktop website when it applies mobile-first indexing. Keywords, search terms, and quality content will continue to matter, perhaps even more than a URL that today is used to organize site content.

To better understand the ins and outs of webpage ranking and mobile responsiveness, or determine what your current website needs in order to address Google’s move toward mobile-first indexing, consult with a professional web developer.

We are a Philadelphia-based web design and development company located in Plymouth Meeting just outside King of Prussia. The experts at Perfexion, Inc. specialize in helping clients market their business online – and on mobile – effectively and profitably.

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