In this video, we give the SEOs out there practical advice on how to increase domain authority to achieve better domain authority. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. It really comes down to links in terms of both quantity and quality, and then time. Watch the short video to learn more about onsite seo, off-site seo, and how quantity and quality of links play their role in increasing your website authority. TRANSCRIPTION: Hello and welcome to our How to Increase Domain Authority video. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer here as well. Good afternoon, Chad. As people dive into SEO, they pretty quickly hit this term "domain authority" as a good measure for their overall strength of their website. At that point, they probably have read a fair amount from SEOMoz who invented that term. They've read about page rank. They're getting into backlinks. They're hopefully getting into content marketing and other syndication strategies to get better domain authority on their site. So today we try to give our viewers some very practical targeted tips on how to increase domain authority to better domain authority. Yeah. And Adam, I wish there was some silver bullet, because it is such an important part of how much your website will show up in the search engines is your website authority and I wish there was some silver bullet that we had. But really website authority comes down to links in terms of quantity and quality, and then time. And those are really the factors that go into determining what a website's domain authority is, so let's dig into that a little bit. When we talk about links, that's the number of other websites that link to your website. And then each of those links though has a value attached to it. So the websites that link to you pass link juice, when ultimately how much they pass to you ultimately depends on how authoritative that site is.. So if you have lots of highly authoritative websites linking to you, you'll have a higher domain authority. If you have not that many websites at all linking to you, you're not going to have that much domain authority. 
So in some ways, people searching for how to increase domain authority are really asking how to do better, stronger SEO. Which is why it's frustrating to shoot this video, because we're back to answers we've had many times before, which is OK, SEO is 30% on-site and 70% off-site tactics. So tune up your website, make great content on your site so it's very, very useful. Put a lot of time and energy into that, because nothing useful comes from something you do quick. But then realize that's really only 30% of your domain authority. Onsite SEO is necessary but not sufficient. You then need to move to off-site strategies, which is really promoting your website through syndication by encouraging people to backlink when it's earned and appropriate from relevant sites. And I guess I would say then domain authority is really a measure of outcome, not as much part of the strategy. If you do all those things we've just said, you should watch your domain authority and you should see it increasing. But realize why does my domain increase is really an SEO question. So a couple other practical guidelines. If you've just launched a brand new domain, it will be domain authority zero. What we would expect when using these tactics and making something that's useful, you should be able to hit domain authority of 25 or so in about 90 days. And if you continue to do so over a year or two, you should see that up in the 40s, and if you do really well, in the 50s or 60s. So Adam, you're saying that this is something people need to be thinking about in terms of years, not just days and weeks? Always with SEO we say six to 12 months minimum, and that's really not on very competitive keywords. For very difficult keywords or big aspirations for traffic from SEO from the search engines, you should be thinking of years. Again, domain authority is a great way to keep your motivation high, because you can look at it as a numeric goal to judge along the way-- these are goalposts. But it's an outcome measure. You need to do everything else we talked about in terms of content marketing, both onsite and off-site, as well as solid PR, branding, all the other things you should be doing in your business anyway. And you'll find that domain authority is really coming along.
UPDATE TO THIS POST: On 1/19/2016, we switched from Moz to A h r e f s for domain metrics in the dashboard. Please see our Moz to A h r e f s system update post.