Domain authority is a website metric developed by Moz. It is one of the most important numbers known to SEOs.

The greater your DA, the more likely you are to have strong traffic and high rank.

More on Domain Authority

• Domain authority is based on several factors, such as how many backward links are pointing to your website and how authoritative the sites are.
• It’s very difficult to gain a DA number of 100. Sites like Facebook and Google have it, but most sites don’t.
• DA is difficult to influence directly. You can’t change your DA score in the same way that you can change your meta tags.

How to Improve Domain Authority

The main two ways to improve domain authority are by removing bad links and gaining good ones. 

Getting rid of bad links is easy. All you have to do is to request the removal of those links, and if that fails, you disavow them.

But with gaining good links, you have two options.

Option 1 is to engage the services of an SEO agency that has relationships with websites and writers who can secure high-quality legitimate backlinks.

Option 2 is to create a site with high value information that elicits links by virtue of its quality.

In the following five steps, we’ll elaborate on what you can do in order to improve your DA.

Step 1: Ensure That Your Technical SEO is in Place

To improve your DA, you need to improve your overall SEO, and that includes aall the details that SEOs know and love—site structure, navigability, breadcrumbs, URL structure, meta tags, header tags, word count, keywords, alt tags, etc.

Make sure that your SEO is up to par before you go further in the pursuit of higher DA.

Step 2: Create Lots of Linkable Content

In order to have content marketing, you have to have lots of linkable content.

Content drives business, and it’s not mere content alone that drives links—it’s top-notch content with power, authority and value.

Step 3: Develop Strong Internal Linking

Internal linking can weave a powerful network within your site that benefits both the user and search engines that crawl and index your site.

A site that lacks internal linking is like a collection of pebbles—disconnected and weak.

But a site that has strong internal linking turns those pebbles into concrete—interconnected and unbreakable.

By having more content you’ll have more content to link to. And the more you link internally, the greater your ability to create a dense and powerful site network will be.

Step 4: Regularly Remove Toxic Backlinks

You can gain a huge competitive advantage by regularly cleaning your link profile. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that most webmasters do regularly. Don’t wait until a penalty strikes to clean up your link profile. Do it now and then continue to do it on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.

Step 5: Be Patient

If you’re doing exactly what we’ve explained in the previous steps, your DA will rise. Generally speaking, the older the domains, the higher the authority will be. To find out the age of a domain, you can use the free Domain Age Tool provided by Webconfs.com.

If you’re in the process of setting up your own online store, you’re already way ahead of the game in terms of your personal drive and motivation. But be aware that you’re taking the brave, lonely path of an enetrepeneur, a path that comes with many risks.

Here are several of the important things to keep in mind when embarking on the journey of setting up your own webstore.

Registering a Domain

Registering a domain nowadays is really easy. There are so many companies that will offer you support nowadays with setting up your website, even years after you’ve paid for the domain name.

The most important thing is choosing a great name that will reflect your brand. If you’ve been running or working at a physical store for a while and you’re trying to bring your business to the online sphere, then it would be common sense for the domain name to match the name of the pre-existing business.

If you’re launching your own business, think about a domain name for a few days before you finally decide on one. Remember, this is the name that customers will be typing into their browser search bar whenever they want to find your business.

Financials

If you haven’t already, read up on merchant banks. A merchant bank account will allow you to accept payments from credit cards and debit cards, which you’ll need in order to maintain transactions with customers online.

If you don’t know the intricacies of setting up your own merchant bank account by yourself, you can do it through an intermediary, which is a company that will specialize in creating accounts for online-based businesses.

Products

Every merchant has an angle. Calvin Klein sells underwear. Best Buy sells electronics. Chances are, you don’t have the credibility of either brand, especially if you’re just getting into the web market game.

But if you’re a good entrepeneur, you should know why the product that you’re selling holds value to the average consumer, and what kind of product people will eventually want to see on your website.

Figure out your angle, because at the end of the day, that could be the core principle that will keep your business from staying afloat instead of going underwater.

Remember that for further assistance, we have plenty solutions on our website that will help you in your quest.

As a webstore owner, an important principle to keep in mind is that no customer will flock to your website for the quality of your products alone. As stunning as that V-neck tee might look, it won’t look so stunning on a murky white background with no catchy text beneath it.

These three components below will help you gauge whether your web design is catching the eye of the customer, or turning them away due to the sheer revolt of your blandness.

1. Style

From hair to sunglasses to rap lyrics, style is the most important component of just about anything worth selling in America. Some people wouldn’t even leave their house in the morning without their hair styled, so it’s interesting that webmasters will leave their websites looking like a mess when they could just as easily hire a hip  designer to tidy things up.

2. Images

Once again, we can’t stress this enough for webstore owners… You need more images than just the

ones of your store products! Slap an awesome header image up top, for instance, to show your

customers that you did a little more work with the place than hiring a photographer to take a bunch of stock photos. It also wouldn’t hurt to maintain at least one image on every page of the website.

3. Typefaces

Although this is probably the most subjective principle, it can’t be stressed enough that this component can make or break a website. The typeface should be attractive enough to draw your prospective customers to your website, without stealing all of the attention from the images. What the typeface should be, however, is up to you. Good typeface is in the eye of the beholder. Peruse all the options, and then settle on the one that will really bring your website to life.

Google Authority no longer exists. Many companies previously used it for their rank and credibility among competitors. It was a tool for companies to monitor their progress. The benefits were innumberal for marketers, creators and businesses. Most importantly, businesses had authority in their industry.

Social media used to be a helpful tool compared to Google Authority. Now social media isn’t a tool, but an operating system for businesses to grow. The use of social media will directly correlate to a company’s growth. Companies can still have a certain type of authority, it will just take more work with a different perspective from that of Google Authority.

Social Media as Google Authority

Some of the most popular accounts on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook are seen as experts in their field. Users go back to their pages or feeds to see what new things have been posted. If the information is interesting and posted consistently, people will look and search for the information. The focus shouldn’t be about promotions, but inbound marketing tools.

One of the biggest changes will be how the content is written. It’s not about how the search engine looks for the information, but how users search for the information. A large portion of the information is passed between people via “sharing.” A function Google Authority didn’t have was mass sharing in a single interface. Many Internet sensations are created virtually overnight by the capability of social media sharing.

A simple way to build a large fan base is to share information. Not all of the content in a business’s social media page has to about the company. It can be from others, which creates a singular database for people to check and follow. As users share information for a single origin, others will look into that page. Sharing other businesses’ information can help build clientele.

It’s no longer about rankings, but likes and shares. Social media is now an online marketing hub that businesses will have to rely on. The question now is, how will businesses create interesting and consistent information for people to share?

Since Google Authority ceases to exist, blogging is a useful tool for maintaining credibility in the market. Blogging takes a lot time and effort, but it creates a streamlined database for users to search through for information. When blogging have a schedule. People will look for it if they think you have information they can trust. It’s a type of authorship to strive for without Google Authority.

A blog, much like the idea of social media, should be used to share information from others in conjunction to promoting your own information. When other information is shared, your credibility will automatically increase. If a blog is full of promotions for the company, the reader will automatically be deterred. Instead, entice the browser. Again, it’s not for writing for the search engage but for the people using the browsers.

Keys of Blogging

Blogging doesn’t have to be completely written. Google Authority looked for key words. Now, though, users are looking for something different. A new phenomenon of video blogging has emerged. This is an easy and simple way to explore different methods of communicating information. Sharing videos from others on your blog also helps with an increase in viewers. It’s an interactive tool that many people are looking for. Video blogging can sometimes be the fastest way of obtaining information.

Creating connections on the internet is becoming just as important as personal connections. Some helpful techniques for blogging without Google Authority can be found at SEO Blog. Sharing different content from other bloggers may prompt them to share your information, especially if you have useful information people are looking for. Readers will see the bloggers they trust sharing your information, which will automatically prompt the reader look into what you have to teach them.

Having other bloggers writing for your blog will also give you an extreme amount of exposure. If they post on your blog, they will share it on their blog as a marketing technique for themselves. Again, it creates a larger readership. Many bloggers will be looking for as much exposure as you are. Create a system with other companies, especially those who could turn into clients.

You’ve seen and observed the SEO trends in 2014. We’ve outlined a few of them below.

1) Become one with your link profile

Two weeks ago, Google said that it was rolling out a humongous “Penguin” punishment, the third of its kind, and that it had already been rolling out for over three weeks. In case you missed it, the Penguin penalties are the primary reason for websites to get kicked off the first pages in Google—something that’s extremely difficult to recover from. There are a lot of great websites that were hit by negative CEO, courtesy of their competitors. The good news is that Penguin 3 also worked to re-rank websites, so if they were previously penalized, they had a chance to be spared any further punishment.

2) Use content to prove to Google you’re real

In our previous post, we showed you how to build a great content strategy for your website, with the assumption that Google helps real companies outrank regular sites. This follows an ongoing methodology of Google that’s been going ever since the Vince update and up to the latest Panda update.

3) Be mobile and be fast… or don’t be

We talked about how a website that isn’t mobile compatible or loads slowly is going to be on Google’s evil side. To back us up on this one, Google released two revolutionary aspects of a mobile user experience. The first one is a new Webmaster Tools feature that allows you to track the mobile UX of your site. Understanding that mobile is growing at an amazing pace, Google now lets your witness the visual errors that might have occured for users browsing your site on the go—everything from small fonts to “touch” elements being too close.

What’s next?

What’s coming next year? We’ve outlined a few of our upcoming ideas below.

1) Adding social layers to a website

We all got used to Google Analytics telling us the location and number of people who visit and perform actions on our site. Then, platforms such as KISSmetrics came along to help us understand even more about who performed these actions. This year, it seems that the next hit will be to dive one step deeper, putting a face on each and everyone one of our visitors and getting them to know each other.

2) Visual content will replace plain text

We all saw the immense rise of visual content. The increased use of infographics and videos instead of plain text articles and mega-successful websites that are based on GIFs alone are showing us firsthand just how vital visual is becoming.

3) Pre-secure yourself from negative SEO trends

There’s a certain irony that search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated, up to the level of a real-life artificial intelligence machine—and a negative SEO is still putting millions of websites in danger. Negative SEO, of course, stands for a competitor or any other person that is trying to de-rank you. It’s as simple as paying a foreign provider $5 to build thousands of black-hat, automated links to your site. In 2015, businesses will need to work a lot harder to defend themselves against negative SEO, with an emphasis on securing their link profile, in order to prove to Google that they’re a real brand.

When new users set up WordPress, sometimes they don’t take the time to read about all the strategies online that can be helpful to them in their journey.

The first step in achieving SEO success is understanding the common terminology that is associated with WordPress.

Regular Web “Page” vs. WordPress “Page”

A web page is a single HTML document that exists at a unique URL.

Even if the extension is .php or .asp, the underlying source code is still HTML.

A WordPress page, on the other hand, is WordPress’s version of a ‘static’ page.

Anytime you’re talking about a page in the context of WordPress, it would be advisable to put the word ‘static’ before ‘page.’ It will make more sense that way.

Pages vs. Posts: What are the Differences?

• A post is dated and ‘time-sensitive,’ and a page isn’t.
• A post can belong to categories, tags, dates and authors and a page can not.
• You can access a post from multiple pages—its category, tag, date or author.
• A page is only accessible from wherever you link to it.

Some additional references about pages vs. posts:

• wordpress.com documentation
• wordpress codex about pages
• wordpress codex ‘the dynamic nature of pages’

Pages are Static

• Pages are like regular, non-blog pages on a website.
• They can have a hierarchy.
• They will not go into the RSS feed.

Use Pages for the Following Type of Content

• An ‘About Us’ section
• If a restaurant, your Menu Page
• Directions page
• Fees pages, etc.

URL Control

URL control can be confusing, because some are set in odd places, or called ‘slugs.’

• Pages and Posts URLs get set within the page/post editor.
• Category and tag URLs get set in their respective menus under ‘slug’
• Author URLs are the ‘username’

If everything is set up correctly, it should be easy to get your titles and descriptions in check.

• Title and description templates get set in Yoast
• Titles and descriptions at the individual page/post level are set in the page/post editor with Yoast
• Need help with a title?  Check out this reference

Google Pigeon was launched three months ago and has already helped local businesses SEO. Instead of local businesses competing against larger corporation, they can now focus on their content. Google Pigeon seems to be rewarding the quality of the content rather than just quantity.

When Google Pigeon first launched, smaller and local businesses were comparing notes. Owners found they could still have rank high in SEO, even though they were different from the norm. Local businesses can now focus on their content and edit their existing material to further their sales.

Even though the full extent of the Google Pigeon benefits are still somewhat unknown, many consider this updated the most important since 2012. That was the year Venice update was released. Brett Relander, a blogger on entrepreneur.com was very surprised about the stark differences between the updates.

Google Pigeon Further Update May Change Existing Benefits

The next Google Pigeon updated has not been release yet, but many anticipate it will change the existing benefits for local businesses. The extent of which could mean a different SEO focus and strategy. For instance, the SERP ranking could fall for local and distant businesses.

No matter how the updated changes Google Pigeon, businesses should focus on social media. Establish directors, such as Yelp, have benefited greatly from Google Pigeon and continue to do so. As previous reported on elieandmai, customer reviews and shares bring in business that SEO ranking are not able to do.

Currently, there is not enough information for businesses to map out a specific plan of action. For now, businesses should focus on the alt tags, keywords, tittle tags, etc and edit any material to help focus on localization.

Google Pigeon is showing a more narrow range of results compared to the past. It is also favoring localized businesses rather than large and global business. So, local businesses need to include hyper local reference on their SEO content. Local businesses now have the tools to bring customers to their website, they just need to create a memorable and positive experience on their website.

What are breadcrumbs? When we hear the term, we might think about the trails we used to make for the pigeons when we were younger. This wouldn’t be a far-off guess, because the origin of the term actually does come from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale in which the two children drop breadcrumbs to form a trail back to their home.

But fairy tales aside, the technical definition of breadcrumbs is a type of secondary navigation scheme that reveals the user’s location in a website or Web application. They’re convenient because they allow users to keep track of their locations within programs or documents.

So if you go on most pages on a website—such as ours—you should see the breakdown as follows:

Home page > Section page > Subsection page

In Magento, the way to notify the server where you want the breadcrumbs to be is through the Page IDs Path.

Notice how in our screenshot example, you can probably guess where the home page, the section page, and the subsection page is just by seeing the numbers breakdown. (And if not, here’s a hint: they’re all placed linearly.)

 When Should I Use Breadcrumbs?

You should use breadcrumb navigation for large websites and websites that have hierarchically arranged pages. E-commerce websites are a great example, because oftentimes they’ll feature a large variety of products is grouped into logical categories.

Don’t use breadcrumbs for single-level websites that have no logical hierarchy or grouping. A great way to determine if a website would benefit from breadcrumb navigation is to construct a site map or a diagram representing the website’s navigation architecture, and then analyze whether breadcrumbs would improve the user’s ability to navigate within and between categories.

Breadcrumb navigation should be regarded as an extra feature and shouldn’t replace effective primary navigation menus. It’s a convenience feature; a secondary navigation scheme that allows users to establish where they are; and an alternative way to navigate around your website.