That's why SEO specialists exist because there are a variety of techniques.
Just a few things I've learned along the way:
- Google favors mobile web performance. If you want to rank higher, your site needs to render fast on mobile. The reasoning is that Google's search objective is to serve good content (whether they are succeeding at this is a different debate) so they want pages that will load fast for the end user, contain the relevant content, and provide the best experience for the broadest audience of visitors.
- To make mobile web performance fast, you need to send tight, compact HTML with CSS inlined where possible. This is why SSG/SSR are all the rage these days because Google favors it for search results. SPAs are indexed in a different pipeline. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- In some cases, you'll need to use advanced techniques like using service workers to offload some of the page loading to a background thread to speed up rendering. See libraries like PartyTown: https://partytown.builder.io/
- Google can surface structured markup data (JSON-LD, RDF-A, Microdata formats) which will make your results visually stand out. Incorporating it into your HTML output is a must in some domains like e-commerce since pricing and product data is surfaced via this markup. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
- Google's search crawler factors structural HTML into account. Therefore, make use of meta tags, <title/>, <h1/>, and other semantic HTML5 tags to mark up your document. See this link for reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-l...
- Google uses sitemaps to find your content. You can improve your results by properly tagging images, videos, and so on. Make sure you do it well. See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- Google's heuristics change all the time. See: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw...
My lesson learned is that this is a very, very hard game to do well. But if done well, your content will eventually make its way up. Because Google re-indexing could take days or weeks, the outcome can take time to actually see.
If your site isn't showing up in search, it's because you're competing against thousands of professionals that are 100% focused on this specific domain of expertise and follow Google's updates to their search heuristics with each release and adjust.
I'm sure backlinks still matter, but the internal search algos have changed so much since the early days of Google that it's hard to know exactly how much weight each part of the equation has.
The main problem with backlinks and keywords is that they are too easy to game so at some point, Google adjusted how they weigh those inputs.
The bigger picture is that SEO matters -- a lot. Backlinks are just one part of they equation. But being optimized against Google's search crawler heuristics is a big picture endeavor.
Having backlinks from NYT, Washington Post and Wikipedia for the term is 1000x more valuable than just hitting all the technical SEO metrics of fast page loading and meta tags.
Backlinks matter so much that many authoritative sites sell them. Of course, they won't admit to that for obvious reasons.
They hit 4 million pageviews/month in less than half a year. Automated ads didn't work, they paid too little and dropped quality too much.
Selling backlinks became one of the core business. They'd actually write full articles for a client and link to their site. The clients were extremely happy with the results. It's not necessarily the ranking, but the article itself would show high on Google.
Also in my own startup experience, I'd buy backlinks from minor bloggers who were blogging on a similar topic. It was something like $10 for a mention. I don't know if it hurt or helped SEO; but it increased credibility in the community and a lot of the people we interviewed mentioned that they bought it because they saw a familiar name.
This is 2016 data though, so take it with a pinch of salt as things could have changed significantly since then.
It's the same. In today's world of hyper SEO optimization and human-like AI content, the only game in town left is authority. And the way to build authority is backlinks.
> Some friends made a sports site for fun. They were a bunch of FB marketers in the early era and just experimented, plus it was a topic they loved ranting on. They did FB ads then funneled the traffic to a WP site. They hit 4 million pageviews/month in less than half a year. Automated ads didn't work, they paid too little and dropped quality too much.
Hah, as it happens, I know quite a bit about that niche. With the legalization of online sports betting around US states in the last few years, there was actually quite a bit of money to be made by high traffic sports blogs working as affiliates. There was also quite a bit of M&A activity, some of these technologically simple blog sites selling for millions to the bigger sports affiliate groups.