Building Domain Authority & PageRank for SEO Success

SEO is not referred to as a art for no reason. Search rankings are integral in generating traffic to a website. Without web traffic not only is your company invisible to the online world, but there is no way potential customers can access your products and services online. Any ethical SEO Agency‘s job is all-encompassing as they are responsible for optimising your site for user and search engines. They are also charged with developing content and fostering relationships for link building. This helps to further improve the relevancy and authentication of your website.

Despite the number of hats an SEO needs to wear, their objective remains fixed: to garner as much traffic (organic and otherwise) to your site. Traffic that will presumably lead to conversions and visibility for your business. Generating traffic is a multi-faceted concept that has many mechanisms behind it. Primarily, the development of an SEO strategy involves monitoring where your site ranks on a search engine (mostly Google), optimising content and link-building to further enhance the position of your site. A high ranking on Google=more traffic to your site which=more brand visibility and conversions.

It’s imperative to remember that when someone conducts a search, they are not searching the entire internet’s archives but are searching Google’s index of the web. This process follows links on pages to determine the most relevant. Links are actually fundamental to the existence of the internet itself, the web is dubbed as such due to the links that sprawl across it like a spider. Links are the primary means of online navigation and are used as a direct way to access something. They are also perceived as a source of trust and authority.

The practice of link building refers to promoting your website to other website owners, with the objective of securing a link on their site directly to your page. Generating traffic from search requires consistent, secure links from relevant websites. An SEO specialist must use outreach and relationship building skills to secure and maintain connections with external websites. Having your website linked to an external website is hugely beneficial in a marketing sense as it is a contributing factor to the way Google’s ranking system operates.

Link-building does more than just improve your ranking, it functions as a valuable brand building tool that exposes your content to a wider audience. With a wider capacity to reach people, there’s a good chance your site will generate referral traffic. Link-building is esteemed within the marketing community as it functions as a vote of confidence from one site to another. Each link represents a connection that can be developed into a relationship. It shows the world (as well as Google) that your site is verified, valid and can be trusted. SEO’s use personalised strategies and tools to convince another website that they should link your page on their site. A 2015 study by BuzzSumo and Moz concluded that the majority of posts online have zero external links, this means that a lot of content is missing the opportunity altogether to garner traffic.

PageRank is Google’s core system that has largely led to their success as the number one search engine. An extremely powerful position in our search-centric era. PageRank uses both machine learning and human engineers to formulate search rankings based on the quality and relevancy of a webpage. As the algorithm continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, search results are increasingly more personalised based on location, preferences and search history. This makes an SEO’s job precarious as they must constantly adapt to Google’s changing algorithm. The now-famous PageRank equation is as follows:

“The PageRank of a page in this iteration equals 1 minus a damping factor, plus, for every link into the page (except for links to itself), add the page rank of that page divided by the number of outbound links on the page and reduced by the damping factor.” https://blog.majestic.com/company/understanding-googles-algorithm-how-pagerank-works/

The most influential variables to consider in relation to PageRank is the incoming links to your site and the relevancy of the pages linked to your page. Additional considerations factored in are the keywords used to link your site and the keywords used to describe your website itself. In particular things like titles and headlines and their relevancy to the search. PageRank is also a Google Toolbar that automates a little green bar to appear each time you visit a site and ranks it from 0-10. This is a tool some SEO professionals may use to track a website’s success, and something web visitors may use to determine a site’s authenticity.

With so much stake in rankings, it’s no surprise that proxy ranking tools have appeared to assist SEO tracking and monitoring. Domain Authority (DA) is a predictive tool that measures the ranking ability of a site. It develops a score that predicts how well a website will rank on SERPs. Scores range from one to 100 with higher scores related to a greater ability to rank. DA simulates the variants that the Google algorithm uses to determine the ranking. It calculates the score by evaluating linking root domains and the number of total links.

DA is a useful tool when tracking the ranking ability of a site. However, it is not a metric used by Google in determining rankings and has no effect on the SERPs. While DA is a useful measuring tool it should not be used a primary qualifier on link building. As Tom Capper explains “Different pages on a domain can have very different strengths, impacting their ability to rank, and their ability to pass value onwards. This is the exact problem that much of technical SEO is built around.” (https://www.distilled.net/resources/da-is-the-wrong-metric-for-reporting-on-link-building)

While both DA and PageRank are important tools to use when implementing an effective SEO strategy, they are not the be-all-and-end-all. There are other metrics to consider to enhance SEO such as organic rankings, backlinks, organic traffic, social media traffic/mentions, time on site, bounce rate and conversions.

When it comes to implementing a successful SEO strategy, it’s also important to consult a digital marketing agency. Not only can they do a thorough assessment of your business’ online presence but they will equip you with the tools to enhance your visibility and conversion rates. One Stop Media are Melbourne’s leading digital marketing agency and have a team of SEO experts that are committed to delivering real results for every business’ needs.