How to improve your blogs DA score.

Never in a million years did I think I'd be opening up a section on my blog giving out technical advice. Even as I type this now it feels a little big headed and preachy & very unlike me... But since going freelance 9 months ago, I've managed to improve my blogs DA score quite dramatically. I mentioned this on twitter and received an influx of messages asking how I'd been able to improve my blogs DA score. So here we are! I'm delving a little further into my blogging strategy and giving some handy tips on how you can improve your blogs DA score.

^{[Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash]}

What is a blogs DA score.

Firstly in order to improve your blogs DA, you must understand exactly what it is.

DA stands for Domain Authority and is a term used by Moz to value how highly your blog ranks in a search engine. DA is a score given to your blog between 1-100 where generally speaking the higher your blogs DA, the more credible your website is.

How to check your blogs DA.

If you sign up to Moz and download the toolbar for google chrome, you'll be able to see the Domain Authority for your website really easily. You can also just as easily pop your blogs URL into the seach box on Moz to get your blogs DA score.

Why is your blogs DA important?

Your blogs DA is super important to both yourself as a blogger, but also potential brands who are looking to work with you. The higher your blogs DA, the more credible your blog is therefore making your website more trustworthy for potential brand collaborations. If you're looking to work with brands on your blog improving your blogs DA should be a priority.

What is a good DA score?

The general rule of thumb is that the higher your blogs DA, the better!

I'd suggest anywhere between 20-40 is considered a good domain authority for a blog.

This doesn't mean to say that having a blog with a DA score less than 20 makes it a bad blog. At the beginning of the year my DA was 16 and I was still getting paid brand collaborations, so please don't let my 20-40 score put you off. That being said, I definitely noticed a difference when I broke the 20 mark with my blogs DA score. More work was available for me to apply for and the costs of the jobs went up too!

^{[Photo by Paige Cody on Unsplash]}

How to improve your blogs DA score.

This is why you're here right? The juicy stuff! Here are six simple tricks I've been using this year which have all helped me massively to improve my blogs DA score. I'm sure even if you're able to implement a couple of them it'll help improve your blogs DA too!

1. Build good quality backlinks.

The best way to improve your blogs DA score is to build good quality backlinks. In a nutshell backlinks are links from other blogs or websites that direct readership your blog. The easiest way for you to improve your blogs DA is to have your blog linked from another blog or website with a higher DA rating than your own. Having your link on a higher ranking site to your own makes your blog appear more valuable.

Building good quality backlinks can be done a number of ways

• Guest posting for others bloggers. I recently guest posted for Sunshine Sarah with blog post about things to do once lockdown ends as well as That Mama Club with an article about being more than just a mum.
• Searching #journorequest or #bloggerswanted on twitter and applying for anything you feel suitable in exchange for a backlink and/or payment.
• Joining the bloggers DA builder facebook group.
• Advertise with other bloggers. By paying other bloggers a small fee to host links from their website to yours will massively help not only your blogs DA but your traffic too.
• Writing for other publications such as House 21 or Your Baby Club.

2. Build good quality internal links.

Building internal links and linking to your own content is equally as important as linking to external websites. By building internal links on your blog you are improving the trust flow of your website which will in turn improve your DA and search engine rankings.

I try and include at least one (if not more) links to my own content in each blog post I create. It's also really important to use the key phrase to link with rather than linking with a phrase such as 'click this link here' as this builds trust for search engines.

3. Creating good searchable content.

Perhaps creating good content is a bit of a no brainer when it comes to improving your blogs DA score? But if you ask yourself why you are creating the content you're creating or if it's searchable this is a sure fire way to improve your DA.

That being said, not every post needs to be written with the intention of being ranked highly. You still need to write because you enjoy writing! I like to have a bit of variety on my blog, so posts such as my labour story or pregnancy announcement (see what I did there with internal linking) aren't going to rank highly at all, but they're personal to me and posts that I enjoy looking back on.

This post for example is something which is highly searchable. I'm sure to get more traffic to this post than I am my labour story blog post.

4. Be SEO optimised.

Improving your blogs SEO is crucial for improving its DA score. SEO or search engine optimisation is how your blog post is read by search engines such as google.

The best tool I've used by far since switching to wordpress at the beginning of the year is Yoast. I have the free plug in however there is also a paid, more premium version you could also download. A couple of simple things I've learnt from Yoast in order to improve your blogs DA are as follows:

• Set a relevant, searchable focus key phrase (mine for this post is 'improve your blogs DA').
• Make sure this key phrase is in the blog post title.
• Give your blog post a Meta Decription. This is a 160 character summary of your post which will be displayed below your blog post title on google.
• Ensure that your key phrase is used efficiently throughout the post - Not too little & not too often.
• Make sure that your blog post URL (or permalink) features your key phrase.
• When adding images to your post ensure that they're uploaded with names rather than JPEGxyz.
• Any images that you use throughout the post should have alternative tags which describes the image. These can be easily edited once the image is uploaded into your post.

5. Check broken links.

Every once in a while you should go through your blog checking for broken links. I'd try and make a habit of it, perhaps by adding it to a monthly blog admin task.

So what are broken links? They're pretty much exactly what they say on the tin. If you've linked to something on your blog where the page is no longer available, this is classed as a broken link. Broken links are bad because they restrict the flow through your blog impacting your ranking & DA score negatively.

If you're a fashion blogger for example, you may have linked to a dress that was available on a fast fashion website last year. It's worth checking that this link is still live and if not, get rid of it!

I currently use a plug in on wordpress called 'broken link checker' which flags any bad or broken links for me. Luckily I'm quite caught up now however when I first installed it I had 500+ broken links... Something which sounds scary, but if you put a little bit of time aside to check each day/week can easily be reduced.

There are also plenty of free websites you can use to check how many broken links your website has. Just pop your blogs URL into their search engine to see how many broken links your blog has.

6. Be consistent.

Improving your blogs DA isn't something that happens overnight. It can't be rushed, but one of the easiest ways to improve your blogs DA is to be consistent. I've definitely found this since going freelance at the beginning of the year consistency has helped massively. I value my mindset change so much and really feel that it's helped improve my websites DA this year.

^{[Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash]}

I really hope this post has been helpful to you in some way. There's plenty of SEO geniuses out there who can probably go a bit more in depth into the different ways you can improve your blogs DA score than I can. I wanted to get my 50 pence in and write something that I would find easy to read. If you've found this post helpful, do let me know & I'd love it if you could share on your socials.

What are your top tips for improving your blogs DA?