The search engines consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to prioritize it:
1. Content on your website
When indexing pages, the search engine bots scan each page of your website, looking for clues about what topics your website covers and scanning your website’s backend code for certain tags, descriptions, and instructions.
2. Who’s linking to you
As the search engine bots scan webpages for indexing, they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has, the more influence or authority it has. Essentially, every inbound link counts as a vote for that website content. Also, each inbound link holds different weight. For instance, a link from a highly authoritative website like The New York Times will give a website a bigger boost than a link from a small blog site. This boost is sometimes referred to as link juice.