There is a myth surrounding SEO that backlinks the only thing you need to focus on. While they are important, it is a complete fallacy to believe they are all that matters – they are simply part of the equation that decides how fruitful your SEO efforts will be.
The fact is that there are a lot of other aspects that really matter to getting your site or page ranked higher in the search engines, from the basic to the most complex. Here we look at a few of the most important aspects of any SEO
campaign.
What Matters in SEO
1. Keyword selection. If you are looking for traffic then your keyword matters. You want to ensure that you are targeting a keyword that gets good traffic AND is easier to rank for, don’t go taking on the big boys unless you are very confident.
Don’t ignore the long tail keywords either, sprinkle your article with such keywords to help bring in traffic.
2. Your writing. It’s not just keywords that matter. Search engines look for similar wording used throughout your article to check if it is relevant. Ensure you are using related keywords rather than just stuffing your main words over and over.
That said keyword saturation does matter – so ensure you have a minimum of 1%, and ideally a percent or two more.
3. Onpage coding. Use codings such as subheaders (H1, H2 etc), bold, italics, underlining, pictures, captions and more. Anything to show you are putting effort in.
4. The URL. Make your URL search engine friendly by using real words rather than numbers, and ensuring that your keyword is in the URL.
5. Search Engine description. Have you included a snippet for the search engine to display? Typically 169 or so characters this description should include your keyword as it is an aspect that search engines take into account.
6. Link out. This might sound strange but linking out (only one or two times per article) actually gains you search engine love by showing that you are directing readers to useful sources.
I agree with you that seo is more than just backlinks. And is also about anchor text, page rank on which the backlinks is found, relevance of the page on which the backlinks is to the anchor text and destination url. But at the bottom of it all, we can all agree that it still all comes down to backlinks and not all the other stuffs mentioned, why simply because without the backlink or the link itself, all the stuffs are pretty useless. But the backlink alone without all the other considerations is just fine.
Nice article however. I really enjoyed reading it, even though I was looking for something elese when google brought me here.