Have you ever wondered why some websites have more visits than others? What magic formula drives traffic to your website and consequently boosts your business? Search Engine Ranking is what influences the numbers making it a linear process. Here is how – a website corresponds to engine ranking metrics, it ranks high on the SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page), ranking makes it visible, and visibility leads to clicks.
Website ranking, the primary concern of most online businesses, is tightly tied to over 200 factors. What is page authority? Page authority is a decisive component, which we will examine in detail in this article. Stay tuned to learn how to increase page authority and its whole essence effectively.
Read below what it is and how to increase page authority
Page Authority (PA) is the metric developed by MOZ. Its purpose is to make predictions on how effective it is to rank a particular page on the SERP.
The effectiveness is calculated on a scale from one to a hundred. The higher the score, the more authoritative the page. It uses the data from scraped web indexes, counts the links, and adds over 40 other factors to generate the number. Even though it is a score up to 100, when boosting page authority, it is far more scalable to gain a score of 30 from 20 than from 70 to 80. Thus, the higher it gets, the more competitive it is to rise. Anyhow, when you learn how to increase page authority in simple and effective ways, you will invest effort and resources in the proper place. Thus there is no other place to wonder what is page authority since you already know the ins and outs.
It is worth mentioning that page authority is a competitive metric rather than a fixed number. Its use is just for tracking and analyzing how well a page will perform on the SERP. The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ score predominantly depends on the competition data. So, in one case, a score of 50 is good, while in other cases, it is low for ranking. In a nutshell, a ‘decent’ page authority mainly depends on competition.
In terms of authority, page authority measures how ‘authoritative’ a single page is, while domain authority defines how ‘authoritative’ a domain or subdomain is. To put it straight, they are the same metric but differ in broadness.
How to Increase Page Authority: Practical steps to a ‘decent’ PA
1. Focus on Link Building
Links, inbound links in marketing terms, are the HTML hyperlinks directing the clicks to a website or another. Link building is the practice of gaining those hyperlinks from an X to Y website. The goal of link building is to aid SEO ranking by increasing page authority.
Generally speaking, SEO is about organic traffic, and link building is the currency that earns organic traffic from the web. Creating strong content alone does not suffice to satisfy Google for ranking.
In learning how to increase page authority, we consider how to make your page authoritative. To amplify the page’s content, you need to strengthen your link-building strategy and earn links from authoritative websites. That is, linking to authority websites makes you one. The logic is we are friends with those similar to us. Google, in terms of SEO, takes into account how many authoritative sites your page is connected to. It is worth trusting if it has links from authoritative websites.
2. Link Internally to Your Content
Linking comes in two ways, internally and externally. Internal links are the hyperlinks that direct to the source domain (the one you are already on). Internal links connect the content within the same domain, pointing to the same website. Internal linking will establish and strengthen site architecture to build an SEO-friendly website and increase page authority for search engines.
Regularly checking the quality of your links must be a top priority. Since links tend to get broken, you should track their health on your page and constantly remove harmful or bad links to keep Google’s standards. It is like a pyramid structure: your home page is on top, and the linking pages are down. The pyramid makes it easy for search engines to find you, and trust rises with page authority. Not only do internal links create an information hierarchy for the given website, but they also improve DA and page authority in a simple way.
3. Link Externally With High PA sites
Opposite to internal links, external links are hyperlinks that direct to a whole new domain outside your page. It means you have an external link on all the sites that refer to your web page in their content with a relevant link to your site.
It is a widely accepted truth that Google’s ranking is primarily bound to the site’s reputation. The site’s reputation is the after-effect of the link-earning process, i.e., external links referring to your website. Besides building up your audience access, external links in high PA sites hold the value of increasing your page authority at a higher speed. External links add up the ranking power, and organic traffic automatically rises since your web name appears in more places.
External links from high PA sites are your winning points and voters for trust and a good reputation of your site. For, imaginably, no good website would link to a bad site. Thus, human logic works for engines too.
4. Create Useful Content
Content creation comes hand-in-hand with link building and link earning. The whole underlying layer of having external and internal links is content. The links should direct visitors somewhere, and it cannot be a homepage or a landing page that aims to sell. The purpose of clicking on the link is to acquire some value. The majority of readers anticipate getting information or being entertained, while just a few percent have the purchasing purpose. According to statistics on Content Marketing, it:
- nurtures 60% of leads
- generates 51% of revenue
- builds 47% of subscribing audience
- provides the highest ROI
The whole point is to create useful and worthwhile content to please humans and machines. Well, first, machines, then humans. Since search engines rank it for the audiences to read, content must also be worth sharing and engaging. You can either base your content on the linking site’s preferences or merely on your niche. Either way, the purpose is to be visible by providing value.
5. Add Images
The next killer that will earn you page authority is the presence of images on the page you want to rank high with high PA. Visuals play a decisive role in high PA when blended with quality content and authoritative links. Next to the fact that images are easily shareable, making them more reachable for content seekers and machines, images improve DA and SEO a great deal. The magic component that helps engines find your images is ALT text (alternative text). Keywords that describe your pictures make it easy for engines to find your page, while optimized images count up to the value of your page and make it authoritative.
Images play a massive role in SEO rankings, making up 21% of a total webpage’s weight. A well-optimized image base will increase the page speed of a website and make content more engaging and worth sharing. Ultimately, it will boost your page authority and increase site visibility.
6. Optimize off-page and on-page
SEO practices are strong only when you take care of both on- and off-page optimization. Discussing the difference, on-page and off-page SEO vary in their sets of performance. On-page SEO refers to the factors on the page, while off-page SEO happens outside the page. Both aim to raise page visibility and are crucial for page authority. Strengthening inside and outside optimization will amplify the page authority.
The page components you could think of improving include:
- Titles and descriptions
- Headings and subheadings (consider the presence of H1, H2, and H3 in sequential order)
- Optimized URL structure with natural keyword insertion
- Natural keyword usage in the page content
- Referring to your site links (internal linking we’ve discussed earlier)
As a general rule, quality works in improving on-site SEO practices.
Outside the page, i.e., off-page SEO is mainly focused on link-building. Improvement-needy components are:
- Natural link-building
- Gain links from unique domains
- Regularly remove harmful links from the page
- Keep the page fresh and fine for users to navigate
- Reach out to influencers to establish top-quality off-page linking
Quality content, combined with internal and external optimization, is bound to improve DA tremendously. The technical part, however, must not be ignored in the merge for an ideal result. Let’s see what the components of the technical aspect are:
- Registered website on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster
- Submit an optimized XML* sitemap to Google (XML sitemap is the list of all the important webpages of your site that the engine crawlers should know)
- Make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl your website by improving your robots.txt settings
- Include the schema (structures data information for search engines to get your content context)
- Have engines understand the page language by proper hreflang usage
All the points mentioned above will put you on track with the steps to increase page authority seamlessly with minimum effort.
7. Improve your website
An improved website is a must-to-have not only in improving customer experience but also when it comes to SEO rankings and when you want to improve DA. Especially in increasing page authority, a refined website is decisive since algorithms understand the power behind it. An improved website takes in mobile-friendliness, ease of navigation, page speed, and connection to other social media platforms. Let’s split each for discussion.
The fact from Hitwise research that 60% of users do their searches on mobile rather than desktop is enough reason to run on investing in the mobile-friendliness of the site. At the same time, Google’s rankings depend on mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. Since search engines show mobile-friendly websites first in search results, it has fewer ranking chances if a site is not optimized for mobile. General domain authority is impacted by mobile-friendliness and adaptability to different devices.
Coming to the site speed, the speedy ones have the upper hand as a rule of thumb. If we reconsider how we quit a page, we will realize that we tend to bounce when it takes years for a website to load. It takes 40% of the site visitors less than three seconds to leave the site. No one has endless time, and disappointment comes as a consequence. Here, as well, algorithms operate by the same logic. Some techniques to increase the page speed of a website include:
- Removing unnecessary plugins
- Upgrading WordPress
- Tracking the server’s performance on the hosting platform
- Integrating a streaming service for videos
- Optimizing the visuals
Social presence is an underlying factor for high page authority. There is a direct relation between Google ranking and social signals. The more shares a page gets, the more visibility it gains throughout the networks. Thus, Google’s algorithms regard it as authoritative and valuable content worth being visible on the SERP. The more shares a site has, the more visible it becomes. So ensure social sharing is possible and the content looks good when shared.
The Final Takeaway on Increasing Page Authority
SEO, on the whole, is a linear process. There is an absolute correlation between the practices of optimization. Domain authority directly affects how well or high your site will rank on the SERP. Moz has developed the concept to assess the power of a website regarding optimization. However, the number is relative, and there is not much need to be overly haunted by it. It is a navigating calculation of your ranking chances.
High or low page authority does not yet mean the page performs well. All decisiveness appears in comparing relations. To summarize the overall concept of increasing page authority and to generalize the takeaways, we can say that page authority is an invented term to track the ranking potential of a page. The most paramount tactic is strengthening the page’s across-the-board performance, making it navigable for humans and scrapable for engines. On top of that your priority should be to increase the page speed of the website and make it possibly user-friendly. Your end goal shouldn’t merely be to improve DA; it is an integral component of SEO strategy, but a whole process is going on underneath. The steps mentioned in this article are versatile enough to raise your page authority scores, contribute to ranking, and drive more organic traffic to your website. Stay put, follow the steps, and guarantee your site’s successful SEO journey.
