Over time, those who are unfamiliar to advanced search engine optimization (SEO) strategies have the perception that the quality of written SEO content is the most important factor to being top ranked on search engines. This perception isn’t entirely incorrect. However, it is misleading and can cause a casual SEO strategist to focus the wrong factors.
When you search a keyword on Google, or another search engine, and click onto a specific result, you’re most likely going to judge the page you land on based on different needs. Does the web page give you the content you were specifically looking for? Is the page easy enough to navigate and view? Does the content actually peak your interest, and does it seem accurate? In terms of quality content, many of these questions are very important to answer. They overall impact the experience of a website’s visitor and how search engines can measure the worth of the page.These elements are important for writing quality, but don’t do much for the actual optimization robots are looking for when indexing websites.
What Is SEO Actually About?
Other than writing quality SEO content, optimization done both on-page and off-page largely factors into what can rank a website greatly on a search engine. Here are the other factors that truly determine SEO success:
Time
SEO is all about time. It is not a process that is completed within a simple couple hours. It can take months, and almost years to gradually build ranking for multiple keywords. It can take a long time to build links externally, that are meant to support your website overall. Gradually and slowly, search engines will discover all connections you are trying to build within your website (from possible internal links), or even links you may have created on other websites that connect back to your site.
Link Building
Search engines could care less about content either being the best or worst if the content itself is not being found through a proper link. If your audience cannot link to it, search engines are very unlikely to even rank it and this will result to no traffic being driven to your website. Think of it this way: The more people can link back to a certain piece of content, the better its chances are of actually ranking for a specific related keyword. Quality links truly do matter, and they can sometimes push a link that has been stuck at position 5 to position 1 on search engines.
HTML Tags
Meta tags, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords, are extremely important. Title tags and meta descriptions are the first impression a possible visitor could have on a specific web page you have ranked. What is displayed in the SERP can make or break whether a person clicks on your website or not.
Source of Content
Link building can play a big factor in giving a website high domain authority. But why is domain authority important? Google will give priority in ranking to those websites that have built such authority and credibility over time. When optimizing a new page, if the website already has high domain authority, they already have a huge head-start in SEO.
Other Factors
Other factors that could affect search engine ranking involve simply having more spend on using better SEO tools, or having a bigger ream of people working on the factors listed above. Another factor is also simple luck. Despite a lack of optimization of SEO strategies, some websites have specific pages ranked up well.
Writing the best SEO content may not be the only way to get your web page top ranked. Overall, SEO is a competition of strategy ‒ strategies that are achieved by multiple levels of optimization. However, perseverance and patience are important and are almost key to such a competition.
