Your website is a major aspect of your brand’s online presence. It is the go-to place for people seeking to learn more about your business or transact with your brand online. This is why it is important for your website to command authority that enables it to be easily located on search engines.

According to Umbrellar’s Marketing Manager Brendan Wilde, “Your domain name plays a big role in influencing your website’s online authority. A lot of planning should be done to select a name that will impact web rankings positively”.

A website with a simple domain name has a high recall rate for online visitors hoping to repeat engagement with it. Likewise, domain names with a “.com” extension will naturally be ranked high by Google’s web crawlers because it perceived to be genuine.

How Do You Determine the Strength of Your Domain Name?

In order remain competitive for search online, brand managers must regularly measure the strength of their domains. Moz, an SEO, software company has developed a number of performance metrics that allow website owners to determine how relevant their domains are.

Domain Authority

This metric is a score that determines how well a website will rank on search engines. Domain Authority is used when comparing one site to another or monitoring the “strength” of your website over a period of time. Moz does this by combining its other metrics; total number of links, root domains, page ranks etc. to produce a final score.

The Domain Authority score is evaluated on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 100.

The score focuses particularly on how domains are likely to rank on Google’s search engine. To influence this score, website owners will have to improve their general SEO especially link profiles.

Trust Flow

Moz refers to this as MozTrust. This metric simply predicts how trustworthy a page is by its proximity and number of links to another trustworthy page. A good indication of a trustworthy page is its link from a source such as a government website and academic or university websites.

Trust Flow is measured on a scale of 1 to 100.

This metric can be improved by increasing the number of links from highly trustworthy websites such as government organizations and academic institutions.

Citation Flow

This metric is specific to Majestic SEO another SEO company. It evaluates the strength of a URL on search engines by calculating how many sites link to it. So while Trust Flow depends on trustworthiness of links, Citation Flow focuses on the number of links generally connecting to a particular URL.

The logarithmic scale for Citation Flow measures from 1 to 100.

By increasing the number of site links to a particular domain, website owners can improve its Citation Flow score.

Page Rank

Page Rank signifies link popularity of a domain. It shows the popularity of any web page on the internet by measuring the number and quality of pages that currently link to it. The MozRank scale for this metric is 1 to 10 and has been designed to grow more easily from 2 to 3 than from 8 to 9.

The average Page Rank score for many specialists like to think of as normal is 3.

You can improve your Page Rank score by receiving links from relatively popular and very popular sites in a healthy mix of numbers.

Domain Age

The Domain Age of your website it the number of years since its registration. Most people of confuse it with Website Age which is simply the first time a website came live online. Domain age could also be determined by the first time it was linked or crawled to.

This factor does not necessarily have a major significance on the ranking of your domain as long as you have good Page Rank and Trust Flow scores.

The main reason for checking these metrics is to discover where your website may be stalling and make changes to improve the ranking and ultimately its online authority. You can easily check your Domain Authority and other metrics on this site.

In addition to checking metrics, right before you register a domain name, here are some simple tips towards establishing a strong one:

• Make it short and simple
• Use a “.com” URL because web crawlers recognize it as legitimate.
• Avoid hyphenated domain names
• Make it easy to remember
• Buy up all possible extensions or variations of its name; .org, .net, .info etc

Golden Rule

Link building is a common SEO practice and the major point to note is not just stuffing multiple links, but directing quality and trustworthy links to your web page.