The wondrous world of SEO. There’s a lot more to it than people realize. As I said in another SEO-related post, there is no magic SEO button that helps you rank high. If it were that simple, I’d be out of a job. Online marketing involves several working parts coming together.

Content Quality: The first, and probably most important, is the quality of your content, or all the things that make your site cool. These are blogs, pictures, originality, headlines, videos, infographics – stuff that is altogether engaging, educational and thought provoking.  After some time, however, content can stagnate. It’s important to keep updating your site with new and exciting content as your business or company grows.

Links: There are a few different types to focus on:

• Click-Through links: I could write a whole blog on these alone, (and, if I follow my own advice, I probably will!). These are what people are clicking on after searching for a particular phrase in Google. However, if clicks were easy to obtain, we wouldn’t have SEO issues. Optimizing your title tag and meta description by using a blog post or some of these popular keywords: How to, Free, You, Tips, Why & Great.

• Internal Linking: These are links that link to pages within your site. Not only does this help with navigation, but it can improve the ranking of specific pages that may not do so well on their own. However, remember to make your internal links out of long tail keywords! After all, those are the phrases your customers are searching for.

• Backlinks: These are incoming hyperlinks from one web page to another website. Google pays particular attention to the quality of the websites these links are coming from. For example, having backlinks from highly established sites with .edu and .gov extensions will gain you a lot of positive attention from search engines.

Website Age: Simply put, the older a website is, the more traffic that site is bound to have. There’s not much you can do except put out the best content possible and be patient.

Growth rate: Google’s smart. They can tell when webmasters are trying to be sneaky by adding an overhaul of relevant backlinks. Does this help you grow? Yes. But it helps you grow unnaturally fast, and Google’s just not about that.

Page Speed: How many times have you abandoned a site because a web page just wouldn’t load fast enough? Probably plenty of times. In this digital age, it’s not that people don’t want to wait – it’s that they don’t have to. Luckily, there are plenty of site readers that can pinpoint what’s slowing your site done. All it involves is changing a few non-technical settings before you see a difference.

Optimize your design: Did you know that 80% of people have their smartphones with them 22 hours a day ? It’s safe to say that if your site is not optimized for mobile devices, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of your potential audience. Not only will you reach more customers, but you’ll keep your rankings high.

Increase your social shares: You probably saw this coming. To keep your chance of click-throughs high, you HAVE TO post every day on every social media platform your business is signed up for – Twitter and Facebook are an absolute must. And guess what? More click-throughs mean more activity which means higher rankings!