What does DA mean?
That’s a question many people who are new to SEO ask. DA plays a role in backlinks, search results, and more.
Domain authority is something that can change your search results, but you have to understand what it means to use it to your advantage.
Read on to learn what domain authority is and how you can use it to improve your search results.
What Does DA Mean?
When people in SEO talk about DA, they mean domain authority. The next question is what does DA mean?
Domain authority is a score to determine the quality of links to your website. It’s also used to determine the quality of your site.
Your site is scored anywhere between 0-100. The higher your score, the higher your domain authority. The higher your DA, the higher you’ll appear in search results.
A Brief History of SEO
Here’s how it got started. When SEO was a baby industry, keywords and backlinks were very important in ranking high in search results. Webmasters and SEO “experts” would buy backlinks from anywhere for $5 and stuff their pages with keywords that didn’t make grammatical sense.
The result was that you’d have spammy websites ranking very high in search results. Quantity mattered much more than quality.
Google recognized this and did something to improve the user experience by improving search results.
That was in 2012 when they rolled out the Penguin update. The Penguin update was the first time Google used its patented algorithm to separate high-quality and low-quality sites.
This left many in the SEO world scrambling to find out how Google ranked the quality of web pages.
Enter Domain Authority
The people at Moz created a method to rank the quality of web pages. That’s called domain authority.
Domain authority measures the trustworthiness and credibility of a site by scoring three factors. Those factors are the site’s popularity, age, and size.
To see DA in action, let’s take a look at two websites: Success Magazine and a site for a local restaurant. Success will have a much higher DA score because it’s well known, gets a lot of links and traffic every day. It’s trustworthy and credible in the eyes of Moz and Google.
Since DA is a measure of trust, the more links you have from high DA sites, the more credible and trustworthy your site becomes. As a result, your DA score will increase.
There are plenty of ways to improve your domain authority score. Good content, fixing internal links and getting internal links all play a role in increasing your DA score.
Understanding Domain Authority
If you want to improve your site’s SEO, it is imperative that you know the answer to the question “What does DA mean?”
DA is simply a way of scoring a website using factors like trust and credibility to separate high-quality sites from low-quality sites.
The bottom line is that when you improve your DA score, you will improve your search results.
For more great tips on building up your SEO, read this article on local SEO and check out these tips.