Things to know about SEO

Things to know about seo

If there was ever an acronym that has been beaten to death over the last ten years or so, that acronym would have to be SEO--search engine optimization, a phrase that means your website's ability to be botted and scanned and pushed upwards by search engines according to the rules of the game as established by a growing little enterprise called Google.
A lot of companies will charge you up your darling little wazoo for the privilege of telling you about all kinds of things you simply must do or else your site will never rank and one out of a thousand of those companies might accidentally get it right. 
That said, here come the facts. Anyone who tells you otherwise has a hidden agenda or else just does not know what he or she is talking about. We've done the research and here are the results.
1. Your website gets points for having a high domain authority, as proved by Ahref. The trick to remember is that the higher the position on SERPs, the higher the domain authority. Correlation is not causation. Which causes which, if either? Our our research shows that if you have a broadly interpreted website--meaning whatever you are selling is sold by lots and lots of others--your search position affects your authority. If you sell something close to being unique, your domain authority impacts your SERP.
2. The more backlinks you have, the higher your position on search engines. Most sites have no backlinks at all, so get some. When I say most sites, I mean 95%. It helps to have backlinks from a wide spread of website topics and the higher the domain authority of the linking site, the more impact the specific backlink will have. A variety of referring domains also helps more than you think. 
3. Remember how everybody and his uncle used to say that content is king? Well, if it is, then comprehensive content is queen. Comprehensive content is content that covers a specific topic all on one page. This information comes straight from Clearscope. Put another way, your content needs to be highly relevant and that means being precise as well as accurate, staying on point, citing sources and not wasting everybody's time.
4. Your website's title tags need to be an apt description of what the site or page is about. Even Google says so. See the Google scoop. 
5. Word count correlates with first page ranking. To be specific, the ideal number of  words per page is 1,447. How anyone can get their page to contain precisely this number is beyond my kin to fathom. Humor aside, a longer page tends to attract more backlinks, while a page that is very long doesn't get read and attracts dust. 
6. If you must choose between a short URL and a long one, pick the short one, although the benefit is slight for ranking. The actual benefit is that people can remember a short url. 
7. A relationship exists between time on site and favorable SERP placement. The average time a visitor spends on a website is 2.5 minutes. No one knows whether this relationship is correlation or causation and if they tell you they do know and they do not own a major search engine, they are delusional at best.
You know what else is important? Other things than SEO. Get your images optimized, reduce HTML rendering, make sure your site is mobile friendly, and all the other things we talk about elsewhere on this Return on Initiative website. And our website scores a 99% on SEO.