Let’s escape the narrow mindset that Google and search engines only prize three primary ranking factors.
As important as links and publishing content remain, search engines are growing far more complex than relying on traditional text and document analysis to rank its index.
Instead, we should view SEO as an organic ecosystem, where each small snippet of code directly or indirectly ties into the performance of your website.
Link building to a slow site becomes useless, as is publishing content that gets interrupted by obtrusive interstitials on a mobile device.
Following the best practices is pointless, unless you’re following all of them.
While not everyone will entirely agree on the best practices of SEO, we can at least agree on some.
Here are five on-site SEO factors that you should always keep in mind when designing and auditing your website.
1. Content
Certainly content is king. But simply having content is not enough to help your site rank for the keyword terms it’s targeting.
According to an Ahrefs study, 91 percent of online content generates no traffic from Google. So what do we know that search engines prize in content creation?
Content Relevance to User Intent
Understanding user intent is the future of search engine development.
In fact, a large proportion of Google ranking shifts in the past year were attributed to experimental algorithm changes, including new neural matching capabilities and the dawn of neural embeddings. […]
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