Every business, either big or small, wants to rank its website well in search engine results. Doing Search Engine Optimization of a website can help it in ranking well in search engines. Besides, you should also know how search engines rank websites. As it will help you to take correct SEO actions as per your website.
How Search Engines Rank Websites?
Search engines like Google rank your website content in steps like starting from crawling, indexing, and then ranking your content. So these steps can be done in 3 stages – discovery, relevance, and authority.
- Discovery Stage: When search engine bots discover and crawl your website pages to go through all the content available on these pages.
- Relevance Stage: After discovering your website these search engine bots do indexing of your content based on relevance. This indexing is done based on the search terms and keywords leveraged within your content.
- Authority Stage: Finally search engines consider your website content for ranking if your website has enough authority. SEO authority is majorly decided based on the quality of your backlinks and content.
So to rank well your website content should be discoverable for crawling, relevant enough to be indexed based on search terms, and authoritative with high-quality backlinks.
SEO Actions to Rank Your Website
As you know all the websites are not similar in terms of size, relevance, and authority. So there may be different SEO actions needed for new or small websites as compared to big brand websites.
- New or Small Websites: New or small websites don’t have good SEO authority as these websites lack high-quality backlinks initially. So for your new or small websites, the SEO actions should be:
- Keep creating unique, high-quality, and relevant content on your new website.
- Create backlinks from high-quality websites to your newly created content. This helps in building authority which means improved ranking strength.
- Big Brand Websites: If you have a big brand website with good SEO authority, which is measured based on ranking strength and quality backlinks, then you need to take SEO actions like:
- Keep creating relevant content that should be discoverable by search engines.
- It becomes easy to get backlinks for relevant content within your high authority website which ranks well too.
How to Check Your Website’s SEO Authority?
As already highlighted above SEO authority, also called domain authority, depends on the quality of your backlinks and conveys how your website’s content ranks in search engines. More SEO authority means more ranking strength of your website’s content in search engines.
To check your website’s SEO authority you need to leverage tools like Moz Domain Authority, Ahrefs Website Authority Checker, and SEMrush Backlinks Analytics.
Just for your reference, you can see in the below image from the Moz domain authority tool. This shows DA 91 for the Moz website itself with huge linking domains, also called backlinks.
This tool also shares the top linking domains list, discovered and lost links in the last few months with many other helpful stats. All this can help you to identify the improvement areas for the domain authority of your website.
Another example is from Ahrefs website authority checker tool which shows a domain rating of 90 with a number of linking websites and backlinks. Here we can see the domain rating of Ahrefs website itself which is measured based on the backlink profile of the website.
Summary
So when you decide to do SEO for your website to rank well in search engines. You should consider SEO actions based on your website is a already established big brand with high authority or it’s a new or small website with less content and lower domain authority.
You should always create relevant content, make it discoverable for search engines and keep adding high-quality backlinks for your content. Doing all this will help you to improve your website’s domain authority and rank your website well in search engines.