My large recent research and personal experience with rankings pointed me with these answers:
1. DOMAIN AUTHORITY
Domain authority is measured by combining many factors related to your link profile and It’s level depends mostly from the trust in the links pointing at you. This factor plays very important role in rankings today if not the most important. To measure your domain authority search engines ask some of these questions:
1. What’s the anchor text of your links?
2. Does the same anchor text repeats over and over?
3. Does your links come from a trusted website?
4. Does your links come from content related websites?
5. Where are those link placed? (Article,footer,sidebar, first paragraph, last paragraph)
6. Does your links come from a website that is buying or selling links? Was that website penalised in the past?
7. Does people link to you once in a month or it happens more often?
8. Does other websites talk about you or your brand?
9. Does your links come from different medias? (video, pdf, audio, press)
10. Does your links come from an article that has plenty of comments?
11. Does many people share your website or articles on social media?
Yeah, Its a large list and it’s very hard to improve your domain authority by SEO practice. These leads us to create killer quality content that it’s likely to share and will naturally build great links and improve our overall SEO.
2. PAGE AUTHORITY
Every page on our website has a unique page authority value. This is measured by the links pointing to the specific page. If you have links pointing only to your home page it’s not going to help your rankings for the other pages. A great way to improve page rank is also by creating social signals for an individual page on your blog that you’re trying to rank. Social signals for individal pages are very important these days.
3. TRUST FLOW
The trust flow counts few factors of which the most important I think is; how often people link to you and what’s their page trust. The trust is crucial for rankings and another better way to improve it is also by citation which means that some of your links must show the full link. (not in anchor text)
4. ON PAGE SEO
Having your page well optimised for a specific keyword is not that easy as it used to be. You must be very careful with “keyword usage” and “keyword density”. The advance Google “semantic keyword analysis” it’s almost human-like smart these days. Without conducting a keyword research is very hard to rank high. Search engines are going to be looking for synonyms of the keyword you’re trying to rank and other words that they have related to it. Best way to look for the correct synonyms is by searching for keyword ideas when using the keyword tool in Google AdWords.
Another very important factor that seems to play important role is using keywords in the alt attributes of the images. I personally had great improvements in rankings by doing this.
I hoped this article helped you forget about page rank and hopefully you’ll start thinking about “domain authority”, “trust flow” and “on page SEO”.