Why External Links, mozRank, and Domain Authority Matter for Your Business

This week, SumAll announced its latest integration – SEOmoz.  As one of the leading search engine optimization tool providers, SEOmoz joins the ever-growing list of platforms on SumAll that businesses can tap into to see a complete view of their online marketing and business analytics. Basically what this means for our users is they can expect to get great insights into how their business’s website is doing in regards to external links and overall authority in search.

Given this exciting news, in this post we'll do a high-level overview of why backlinks, mozRank, and Domain Authority matter for your business.

External Links

External links, also known as backlinks and incoming links, are the links your website receives from sites other than your own. When a website gives you an external link, it is recommending your website to both its visitors and search engines.

Webmasters usually link to websites in the following ways.

• http://www.sumall.com/

• SumAll

• Website Analytics

• Website, click here, or other generic word / phrase.

Each of the above counts as an external link. If someone uses keywords like website analytics as anchor text to link to your website, then it has the added benefit of telling search engines that your website is about website analytics. Search engines can also use the keywords around a link to determine what the linked to website is about. So if someone linked to SumAll, a website analytics tool, then search engines could correlate website analytics to the link.

Essentially, the more quality external links you have pointing to your website, the higher your website will rank in search. Also, the more quality external links you have pointing to your website with specific keyword anchor text, the more likely you will rank well for those keywords.

There are exceptions, however. Webmasters can use a rel=”nofollow” tag in the HTML code for their link to your website. This tells search engines to ignore your link. Webmasters can also use a redirect link that will do just that – redirect people from a link on their site to yours. This will also not count towards helping your website with ranking well in search.

We’ll talk about ways you can build external links to your website in a future post, but before you begin in any link building campaign, you need to keep these things in mind.

• Don’t overuse keyword anchor text. If you have more links to your website that use a specific keyword phrase, it could tip off Google that you are using unnatural link building techniques. This could get your website penalized in search.

• Aim for quality links. Some companies will try to sell you bulk link packages through article marketing, social bookmarking, and other methods that could result in a lot of low-quality links for your website. This also could get your website penalized in search.

The goal to any link building campaign should be to make your external links look natural!

mozRank

mozRank is a score of 1 to 10 from SEOmoz based on the number and quality of the external links pointing to your website. A high mozRank means that you have a lot of links pointing back to your website. Newer websites tend to have a mozRank from 0 to 3, average websites tend to have a mozRank from 3 to 5, and websites that are popular or have engaged in an active link building campaign tend to have a mozRank of 5+.

Here are a few examples of some sites you might know and their mozRank.

• CNN.com has a mozRank of 7.41

• Facebook.com has a mozRank of 8.38

• Google.com has a mozRank of 8.81

Does mozRank matter to the average consumer? No, unless they happen to be a SEO consultant. But a change in mozRank matters to you as it shows whether your business is building or losing external links.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority is a score of 0 to 100 from SEOmoz based on over 150 different algorithmic factors, including your external links. A high Domain Authority means that your website is more likely to rank well in search engines over sites with a lower Domain Authority.

Here are the same example sites from earlier and their Domain Authority.

• CNN.com has a Domain Authority of 100

• Facebook.com has a Domain Authority of 100

• Google.com has a Domain Authority of 100

Domain Authority, like mozRank, probably does not matter to the average consumer. This is a score that matters to your business as it shows whether your business’s website is increasing in authority in search engines.

Check Out Your External Links, mozRank, and Domain Authority

Be sure to sign up for a free trial on SumAll and see how your website measures up with external links, mozRank, and Domain Authority. Then keep an eye out on our future posts where we talk more about link building and SEOmoz!

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.