Many entrepreneurs imagine that all they need to do is a set up their business and wait for the customers to come rolling in. But in reality, this isn’t usually how it works. The chances are that if you’re a new business, your website will be buried under hundreds of other websites way down in Google’s search results. And given that less than one percent of users ever bother to search beyond page three, you won’t get found.
So what can you do about it?
The answer lies in something called “page authority.” This is a term that search engines use to describe what it thinks is the quality of a page. The higher the page authority score, the more likely your page will appear at the top of the search results for a particular query.
This is one of the reasons why 1st Straw offers local SEO services for businesses. Companies don’t usually understand that they can boost their rankings by improving their authority. Even if another website is better optimized to appear higher up in the results, they can often get a higher rank, thanks to the fact that their page authority is better.
So how do you do it?
Improve Your Internal Linking Structure
An obvious way to improve your page authority is to improve the number of links to your site. But what many entrepreneurs forget is that internal links are another important way to improve your site. No, internal links don’t have any effect on the ranking of your site directly. But internal links can make your site more useful to your customers. Customers who are able to easily navigate your site will tend to stay there longer, indicating to Google that your site is providing a quality experience to its users.
Remove Toxic Links
Something that can really damage your domain authority is broken or toxic links. It’s worth checking every now and again to see whether any disreputable websites are linking to yours. The problem with getting links from sites that have a bad reputation is that Google might suspect that the links are fake. As a result, it might choose to punish your domain, causing it to fall down the rankings. It’s a good idea, therefore, to make sure that there are as few bad or toxic links to your site as possible.
Structure Your On-Page Content
To get better domain authority, it’s essential to make sure that you’re optimizing all your on-page code, including things like meta tags, title images, and content. It’s usually best to stick with sans-serif fonts, as these are by far the easiest to read on a screen. Organizing your content into columns and using Arial or Helvetica tells search engines that users are likely to get a quality experience from your website.
Choose A Suitable Domain Name
Your choice of domain name needs to be relevant to your website’s content. If it’s not, then your page will lack authority. Thus, if you’re an SEO company, then it might be a good idea to have the SEO keyword in your domain.