Domain Authority and Page Authority
One of the great things about having a blog is the ability to share ideas and speak about useful tools that exist in making our job easier. One such tool is the SEO Toolbar from SEOmoz, which includes two new metrics called Domain Authority and Page Authority. Domain Authority takes into consideration a number of things that the folks over at SEOmoz have determined to be important in the ranking algorithms at the search engines like Google and Bing.
Ranking well in the search engines is largely influenced by the links that a website has obtained over time. These links come from other sites that consider the content on your site worthy of alerting others about. These topics will either be articles published on a blog, a great video or other types of material that is aimed to help people understand or learn new things. These posts are typically identified by well written and thoughtful content that conveys a specific concept thoroughly.
This concept will likely become a heated debate simply because the only ones who really know are the search engines themselves. The good news is that if your produce high quality content that is done to help others and isn’t solely published to help the bottom line at the business. In fact, some of the best business blogs don’t even mention their products that they offer. One great example of this is the Mint Blog. Notice that the topics on their blog aren’t a direct promotion of what they sell, rather they are electing to post about issues and information their target market would find interesting or helpful.
Domain Authority Is Earned
Domain Authority
You could get 10,000 links to your site and still not have the Domain Authority that another site with 250 links has. This is because the quality of the links, the source of the linking site, is considered authoritative and a site that produces good content.
SEOmoz captured this in their toolbar and makes it really easy to see this metric at a glance. They show you Domain Authority as well as Page Authority. When you have both you can not only find great sites with lots of authority to get links from, but which specific pages on those sites would send the most link juice.
Page Authority Will Show You Which Pages To Optimize
As mentioned, Page Authority can help identify the top performing pages on your site. These pages should be reviewed so that they are able to produce the results they should in terms of ranking and linking to other relevant areas on your website. Internal linking is another topic all together but having a good idea of how you’d expect visitors to your website may want to click on after they hit your site is a very significant part of the success of your site.
The pages that have the most Page Authority will be your core pages that you should then develop additional content to supplement. Google and Bing will rank sites well if they are able to provide quality content that keeps a reading on the right track according the search queries they perform.
Conclusion
Create the content that will help build your site’s Domain Authority. Measure the success of the individual posts or pages with Page Authority. Optimize your site with better content that fits well with the high authority content you’ve produced and build your audience.