How Much SEO Authority Does Your Website Have?
How much SEO authority does your website have?
How does Google view your website and backlinks?
Let’s learn how to get free insight on your SEO domain authority!
First thing’s first: What are backlinks?
Backlinks are the links from another website, back to your website.
They indicate that your website has relevant, useful information.
One of the biggest ranking factors to Google in terms of SEO is backlinks.
For example, in my post Why No One is Subscribing to Your Email List, I link to Melyssa Griffin as an example of a great opt-in offer. That link is a backlink to Melyssa’s website.
Another popular example of backlinks has to do with guest posting. I guest posted on Miranda Nahimas’s blog about the 5 Habits of Successful Social Media Experts. So in a nutshell, I wrote helpful content for her audience, she published it on her website along with a section “About the Author” that has a link back to my website. That’s a backlink for me.
Backlinks are basically how the internet stays connected.
A website that gets backlinks from a lot of other websites with similar topics (random topics don’t help Google figure out what kind of information your website has on it), helps boost that website’s search engine ranking.
Search engines want to be helpful to their users. The more helpful your website is to users, the more likely Google is to show it in a search result.
How does Google know if your website is valuable? A good indication is if other websites are linking to it.
But keep in mind….not all backlinks are the same.
Backlinks are weighted based on that linking website’s authority.
Higher influence websites typically rank higher in search results.
The value of a backlink depends on the authority of the referencing website. Every website has an authority rating. That authority rating impacts the value of the links from that website.
If both my website and Oprah’s website link back to your website….which backlink do you think would have more power?
Oprah’s.
So it’s not only the NUMBER of backlinks your website generates, it’s also the AUTHORITY of those website’s that are linking back to you.
No one knows for sure exactly how much weight backlinks have when it comes to the overall ranking, but we do know that it’s significant.
Curious to see how search engines rank the authority of your website?
Moz.com created a free tool called Open Site Explorer that takes the URL you type in and predicts the authority of that website based on over 40 factors. This calculation was made to try to replicate how Google generates search engine results.
Your results won’t be a set-in-stone type thing because Google keeps a ton of SEO factors a secret, but it’s an awesome way to gauge your website’s influence and get a little insight on your backlinks.
Why is this information valuable?
Doing a quick scan of your website to get an overview of your backlinks and domain authority can help for a number of reasons:
- Give you an idea of what website’s are linking back to you and why
- Help you find any bad links or errors that are hurting your website
- Compare your website authority with your competitors to see how you’re matching up
- Investigate where your competitors are getting high-quality backlinks from so you can fine tune your own backlink strategy.
Let’s run your website:
Google “open site explorer” or go to: www.moz.com/researchtools/ose and type your domain name into the search bar.
Click the blue search button and that free tool will run your domain URL and find all the backlinks to your website + any links that are hurting that domain.
Once it pulls up your website’s report, it will give you a number out of 100. The higher the number, the more authoritative the website.
Super cool, right? Once you have this information, it will make it easier to come up with a strategy to help bump up that domain authority number!
Want a little more explanation on the Free Open Site Explorer Tool?
Here’s a more in-depth video showing you how to use it:
If you’re not too happy with your backlink score, check out this awesome resource of 1500+ quality blogs to guest post on.
All of the blog posts are organized by industry/audience type AND have their Domain Authority all ready listed….genius, right?
