So When it Comes to SEO, What Should You Focus On?
So if you aren’t going to be focusing on backlinks, what should you be spending your time and energy on. There are SIX things that are the most critical aspects to SEO that you should be investing ALL of your SEO attention to moving forward. They are as follows.
- Your Content Quality. Content is king/queen! You have likely heard that statement and the actual quality of your content is and should always be the core focus of your SEO activities. Google is a search engine which delivers content.They are looking for the best content and every algorithm update they make is in effort to find and deliver the best content to its users. That is their business, that is how they make money. Create thorough, helpful and informative content. That is the basis of SEO. Cheap out on your content and you are going to have an unsuccessful SEO journey ahead.
- Targeting Keywords. Every page/post you create should have a certain level of keyword “intent”. That is, you should be putting emphasis on certain keywords within your content.I always recommend that your target keyword be somewhere within your title, within your first paragraph and then as you write your article, write NATURALLY. There will likely be more occurrences of your keyword naturally within the rest of your content…that is fine. Just don’t STUFF keywords, that is bad.
- LSI WIthin Your Content. These are keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword. For example, the keyword “diet” would semantically relate to “lose weight”.When you write naturally, it is obvious to Google. The LSI (Latent Semantic Index) score of your content will play a big role in terms of your overall ranking and will actually lead to rankings under many other search terms. The moral of the story here, write naturally.
- Engagement/Comments. Dialogue within your content is a strong indicator that people are actually reading your content, that it is of high quality. People will engage in content that they enjoy, that they trust, and often times content that already has comments and dialogue within it. You can leverage the SiteComments platform.
- User Experience. Google focuses a good deal of it’s time and energy determining whether or not a website is a quality user experience. Some things that it is focuses on are web page load times, does it work on a mobile device (responsive), the UX design, how easy the content is to read/interpret, content length, and structuring of your content.
- Your Overall Website Authority. This will happen over time. As you build out a website in any niche, you are going to gain more and more authority naturally (assuming you are doing so in a way that focused on quality). Consistent content creation, consistent engagement within your content, and TIME are what will lead to website authority. With effort, you can really start to have authority breakthroughs around the 3 month mark.
So at the end of the day, there is going to be conflicting information online about techniques and strategies. Different companies with different motives are going to push their latest “idea”, technique or in many cases, they are tied to an tool/services that no longer works (in this case, anything related to backlinks).
To build a very successful (and high ranking) website online, you do not need backlinks.
Not one.
Quite the contrary. In fact, if you are wasting energy on getting backlinks, which have next to no value in your business. You are taking away from time that could have been much better invested on other things. Like content. Like user experience. Like engagement.
If you focus on the stuff that matters and you avoid trying to “trick” Google into giving you rankings, you have a long term SEO strategy.
If you have any questions about backlinks or SEO or would like to offer any feedback/experiences that you have had over the years, please leave your comment or questions below.