Have you ever wondered how your website is doing? Are people seeing it? Does it really matter? In the grand scheme of the internet, how good, or bad, is my website? In this short post, we’ll share how you can check your Website Authority, which is only one of many variables to consider, to see how your site stacks up against the rest.
Website Authority
Website Authority, also known as Domain Ranking, is a measurement of how important your website is to the internet. While that’s a complicated metric to capture, the basic measurement is a count of backlinks to your website. In theory, the more websites that point to your site, the more important your website is to users of the internet.
Google, and other search engines use backlink counts in their SERP scores. Now most authority checkers are just using the count of backlinks to drive your Domain Rank, but Google looks at other websites with similar keywords to compare your counts to theirs, and even looks at the quality of your backlinks.
What’s a Backlink?
A backlink is simply another website that puts a link to your website on theirs. For example, ahref’s Website Authority checker is what we’re going to use to demonstrate how to check your website authority. Here’s a backlink from our site, 120 web design, to theirs: AHREFs Website Authority Checker.
It’s not just the text that makes it a link, it’s actually making a hyperlink to the site that makes it a backlink. There are several settings in a backlink you can specify, like nofollow, and openning in a new tab. We’re not going that deep for this post. But that’s a backlink. Practically speaking, I just improved ahref’s website authority because I thought it was helpful for me to share it with my audience.
How do I check my Website Authority?
First, you need the url of your website. If you don’t have a website, your ranking is zero, because it doesn’t exist. If you do have a website, get ready to see how you are doing.
Step 1: Click on my hyperlink to AHREFS Website Authority.
Step 2: Enter your website in to the box that says “Enter Domain”.
Step 3: Click the “Check Authority” button.
Step 5: Read the results.
Reading the Results of a Website Authority Check
Here are the results of one of our client websites, StephensInsightGroup.com. Notice I didn’t hyperlink it. I could have, but I wanted to give you an example of something that looks like it should be a backlink, but isn’t.
The Domain Rating, or Website Authority is 11. The score isn’t great. A good score is over 50 or more. But there are a lot of things to consider. In this case, the business itself is a consulting business in a highly competitive market, it’s a fairly new business, and the focus of the website, to-date, has been more about credibility than SEO.
There are 110 backlinks, which is not a small number. That means there are 110 pages on the internet that have linked back to StephensInsightGroup.com.
There are 20 Linking website. The first number, 110, is the number of links on the internet pointing back to Stephens Insight Group’s website. But some websites might link multiple times. So the unique number of domains, or websites that point back to Stephens Insight Group is 20.
Okay we will talk about dofollow. When you hyperlink to a website, you have the option to specify the dofollow tag. The dofollow tag tells search engines that the content is related to your content, and is an indicator that that site is important to your readers. Without the dofollow tag, search engines will see that the link exists, but won’t be included in backlink counts. The 85% indicates that 85% of stephensinsightgroup.com backlinks are credible to the source websites. Meaning, most people that link to it, think it’s relevant.
What’s Next?
So how did you score? Is someone actively working on adding backlinks to your site?
There are 3 things you might do next.
- Do nothing. Let your SEO score stay stagnate with organic, but very slow growth.
- Take a DIY approach and look for ways to get other people to link to your site?
- Contact Us today to see how we can improve your Website Authority.
Keep in mind, your website authority needs to be more than a backlink. People won’t link to your website if your content isn’t helpful. So dedicating time to keep your content fresh, helpful, and referenceable, is a critical component to any SEO strategy.
