We get this question all the time from our own personal clients.

• What are the most important seo factors?

• What should we focus on when doing search engine optimization?

We tell our clients to stop thinking seo is rocket science.
It’s not, it’s actually quite simple but unfortunately quite time consuming and a repetitive process.

So what are the most important search engine optimization factors? You can actually count them on less than 5 fingers.

1) Backlinks

These can be off site links, internal links but preferably a combination of both.

If you already have a large site with a large amount of indexed pages, this gives you the opportunity to increase the amount of internal links quite easily. How? Well each additional page you have on your site gives you one more chance to link to another one of your pages. Don’t have many pages on your site? Our advice is to create some more asap. This will allow you to target more keywords while increasing your internal links.

Of course, don’t limit yourself to on site links. Go out there and build quality backlinks from related sites.

2) Page Title

This seems like a no brainer but many people forget that having a quality title on your pages is extremely important when ranking in the search engines. It’s one of the major signals search engines look at when crawling websites and associating relevance for rankings.

It’s wise to include your main keywords in the title and possibly another extra keyword or two that you’d like to rank for. Don’t forget to make the title interesting, enticing google searchers to actually click on your link.

Don’t be lazy and forget or ignore creating your titles, it’s important for ranking and also in getting people to click on your listings.
3) Placing your keywords in your page – preferably in great content

When creating your content, don’t just make it ok. Make it great while including the keywords you want to rank for.

Why make it great? Although this isn’t a guarantee, great content encourages other quality websites to link to you giving you additional backlinks. This can also lead to great relationships and friendships with other websites/partners in your niche. Don’t underestimate the impact this can have for your business. One partner can bring your business from zero to hero.

Related posts:

1. Basic On-Page SEO
2. WordPress SEO: Part 2