I’m serious: reading the SEO starter guide (particularly the hidden bit at the end) will save you months and years of wasted SEO strategies.
Many SEO newbies follow the latest trendy advice but fail to go to the source: Google itself. I invite you to look at this page:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
And since much of the article is littered with vague advice that is open to interpretation and may be used by Google to avoid divulging the most important ranking factors, I invite you to look at this section:
If you’ve followed run-of-the-mill SEO advice to this point, you might be perplexed: “This stuff contradicts many of the things I’ve been told.” Right.
In this audio, we walk through Google’s SEO starter guide.
In summary:
- the keyword meta tag plays no role in rank,
- you need to have at least one word, i.e. word count is irrelevant to rank,
- “PageRank… is one of the fundamental algorithms at Google” (meaning, by necessity, so are backlinks),
- Header order doesn’t matter, and
- EEAT is not a ranking factor.
That’s not my opinion – it’s Google telling you what does and doesn’t work.
Take these points to heart and you’ll save yourself a lot of time, a lot of heartache, and possibly a lot of money on useless SEO courses and SEO content writers who are convinced (or want you to be convinced) that you can just EEAT your way to position 1.