SEO can seem like a minefield. Part of the problem is that there is a lag between the time that you implement changes and the time that you see the results of those changes. You could do everything right today, and still not see positive results for two to three months.

That can be quite disheartening, but it’s the way the system works. The best you can do is to understand what ranking factors carry the most weight and then aim to create content that will help you score with the search engines.

We’re going to focus here on factors that we know work for Google, because this search engine handles more than 89% of all internet searches at the moment.

The good news is that these tips will work for any other search engine.

Quality of Content

Publishing top-quality content is something that Google told us to do a long time ago. And it makes sense. If you’re putting out great content all the time, it’ll be considered valuable by your audience. It’s more likely to get it shared than anything else.

High-quality content will make your audience stay on your site for longer because it gives them the answers that they were looking for. The longer someone stays on your page, the better it looks in the eyes of the search engines.

Click-Through Rate

This is how many people click through to your site from the search results. To get more people to click through, make sure that the meta description has been well-written. It should be relevant to what’s on the page so that people know exactly what they’re clicking through.

It’s tempting to use a clickbait title, but that strategy backfires quite quickly as it’s bound to lead to an increase in the bounce rate.

Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate will kill your site’s traffic fast. If people click through your site and then bounce off quickly, search engines will see this as a sign that the site didn’t have the answers they were looking for.

A good tip is to link through to a related, interesting piece of content on your site. This keeps the audience longer on the site and encourages them to explore it further. If the content is, say 3,000 words or longer, can you break it up into two parts? This would mean that the person has to click through to at least one other page.

It’s the principle that those sites with slideshows count on. Those are highly annoying, so we don’t recommend making the person click through to another page more than once or twice per article.

Backlink Profile

One ranking factor is how many quality sites have linked through to yours. There are a lot of ways to go about link-building. If you’re creating outstanding content, though, other sites will naturally want to link through to you.

Never buy backlinks or offer a link-for-link trade. If you get caught, and the chances are good that you will be, the search engines will penalize you.

Final Notes

Those are the main link factors used to suss out great content. Present excellent content every time, and you’re bound to see your organic traffic rise. If you’ve got top-notch content and your pages load fast, therefore you’ve won half the battle already.