Understanding the core pillars of SEO is one of the most important things you can focus on. While SEO may evolve over time and with each new major update we get new learning lessons, we can also assume that the same core strategies will work over a longer period of time even if some tweaks have to be made to keep things up to date.
What matters most is focusing and fixing these core pillars over time so that your strategy can adapt and move with the times, breaking down these elements into smaller chunks that you can edit and tweak and model after successful sites, which can only mean that your site or your clients’ sites can continue to grow after each and every update.
Nothing outlined in this article is more important than the rest. Without taking the full puzzle into consideration, you can’t formulate a real strategy that will dominate the search engines for years into the future and start getting better results with each update while your competition is scrambling to recover.
Everything is interconnected when it comes to seeing the full picture with regard to a great SEO strategy; some pillars can matter more depending on your market and what your overall business strategy is and if you can afford both the time and effort required to gain a position in your chosen market.
While we don’t know exactly what Google uses, we can be sure that certain factors such as content and links will always be a core part of what makes a website look popular and rank well for search terms; those who focus on mastering the fundamentals over a long enough time will always come out ahead when we look years into the future.
Our first pillar is backlinks. Links have mattered since the very start of search engines and search marketing and were a large part of the Google algorithm in 1998; a website would rank well if it got a lot of other sites linking to it. Over time the algorithm has evolved and become much smarter in how it detects and rates a backlink so it knows which links are more valuable than others.
There are many things to consider when it comes to links in general; we, as people who practise SEO, can work on our internal links and ensure that we get Google to pay attention to our important pages by linking to them in our content.
An important consideration when it comes to link building is anchor text. This is the text that other sites use to link to your website. In the modern-day algorithm we need to vary our anchor text much more and be careful with using exact match anchor text, as this can lead to penalties when used too frequently.
Attracting links is perhaps the most important strategy you need to master because good links are extremely difficult to acquire. The best bet you can make is investing in top-quality content that people get value in reading. Once this is in place, you will find that you get many top-quality links which grow year upon year. The best piece of advice is to create quality content and value for your market first, and then the links will follow.
To get top-quality links, you should think about what type of content would add value to the internet and start with that idea; forget about search engines and focus on creating valuable content or tools for your market to use. Think about what kind of content your market is hungry for, and you should also look at your competitors’ websites to see what content is popular before trying to guess what your market wants. Focus on what’s already working and think of a way to put a unique spin on it or make it better.
The last thing you want to think about is linking out to credible websites that can help your site visitors find more information; don’t be scared to link to quality sites in your market, as this will also boost your authority with search engines and, in the eyes of your website visitors, will also create trust as they see you as a trusted authority who will help guide them to further research materials.
If you do a quick analysis of major information sites such as public health sites, news websites and online encyclopaedias, you will find that they all link out to other authority sites that tend to have more detailed information than they do. This helps to position them as a place users can go to get more generic and easy-to-understand information while also helping to connect web users to a trusted authority site which has deeper-level knowledge on the subject.
Our second pillar to focus on is the performance of your website. There are a few factors you can control under this pillar, and while it may not be the most exciting task, if you can just focus and make small changes to this pillar, you will see another increase in results. If you neglect this section, you will likely see high-ranking pages that don’t get much engagement or sales due to poor user experience.
As general advice, you want to focus on ensuring your website is as fast-loading as possible, as a slow-loading site generally makes people click the back button or become very frustrated with their overall experience. In this case you can take several steps, such as researching how to enable a CDN, optimising images and also upgrading your server to a more powerful option with more resources.
To boost performance further, you can research how to make your site more responsive and also research the topic of visual stability; these will help to keep page load times down to a minimum. These may only improve your page load times by fractions, but those small amounts may make the difference between making a sale and getting a better ranking in search engines.
The third pillar we can look at is the actual user metrics of your website. Search engines support websites that consider the user to be the most important thing, so you should look into your analytics metrics to see what users are doing once they visit your website and then adjust your SEO strategy to make it easier for users to get to important sections on your website with ease.
Some fixes for improving website accessibility include improving coding, making sure website users can use the tab button to access critical fields and ensuring alt text descriptions are added to all images, and be sure to include captions to any videos you have. You should also make your website very easy to read and understand; improving accessibility is an ongoing issue and not a one-time fix.
You should also look at the intent behind the search to understand what the searcher wants when they search for the keyword; you need to understand what they are really seeking behind the words they type in. In this case we need to do market research and get into the mind of our website visitor and rework our content to match what they need from us. Again, this is an ongoing process as we learn more about our users and gain new insights.
You can also look at your website’s interactions. Improving things like meta descriptions to increase click-through rates is a good start, but also focus on what users do when they actually click on your site. Things like seeing what they type into your search box or what pages they click on in search engine results will give you some insights into how to improve your search engine visibility.
You should also consider things like location. The location of a searcher is very important, and this is perhaps the most important factor if you are targeting local keywords such as “tree surgeon Essex”. To improve your location data, you should include your local address and also include any postcodes that you serve or can deliver to. Make sure to include postcodes and town or city names, and you can also break down your town or city into separate area names to rank for further long-tail local queries.
The problem with local SEO is that many sites just produce a huge amount of pages but change the title tag or heading tags to rank for that location; this is very frustrating for users who are searching for a local business, so avoid this strategy. A better method would be including testimonials or case studies of customers who are based in that area. You could also include some basic information about that location instead of just copying and pasting the same generic content template with a few modifications.
The last thing to look at is task completion and how satisfied users are with your website; ultimately you want a site that is easy to use and doesn’t take forever to figure out how to perform important actions. Ask yourself how you could make it easier for users of your site to perform actions quickly; this may mean featuring important sections or pages of your site on every page and redesigning forms or order pages to make ordering a product or asking for further information quick and easy.
Our fourth pillar to consider is site reputation, which basically is a metric measurement of how trusted your website is considered by search engines. The metric used by official Google guidelines is called the E-A-A-T model, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
In this case you can take a look at the official Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines to get some really helpful advice on how to improve the overall trust of your website, which will help you to become a trusted authority inside your market.
If you focus on improving your site’s overall reputation, then this can lead to an increase in your brand’s perception, increased search visibility and more traffic from channels such as social media as users of your site discover it and share it across their social media accounts.
You can improve your site reputation by improving your content and taking a good long look to see if you are offering an impartial view on the topic or if you are leaning into what would be more popular or profitable to say. Being honest and accurate is a valuable trait to have when it comes to building a trusted website that people will revisit over the long term. Your content and any advice given should also be accurate, up-to-date and safe. This is especially true when it comes to commenting on someone in the public spotlight, as incorrect information can lead to a negative impact on someone’s character, which can lead to legal issues.
When you create content, you should also be honest about your experience levels. If you have no experience inside your chosen market, then the best piece of advice would be to be upfront and honest about this within your content but also take time to interview professionals and experts to gain insights that can be shared with your website visitors. This is especially important when it comes to content such as product reviews; search engines will reward content that has been created from firsthand experience of using the product.
You should also look at how many pages of content you have related to this topic and how often you keep that content updated. Having a large pool of information which narrowly focuses on a single topic and is kept up to date displays to search engines that you are an authority on this topic and will likely result in more links to your site and higher search engine visibility.
You should also do some basic branding using your website; you want everything you do to be identifiable either visually or by tone. You can also include names or slogans, and keeping things consistent across the web is a good idea. Don’t be afraid to explain what your website does, and having an about us page is also valuable, but most branding will come from things like colours, logos, brand name mentions, social shares and essentially building your brand name and message across all content.
The last element to tackle is claiming what level of expertise you have; you should include this on your website in the author section or perhaps somewhere in the about us section. You want your site visitors to be able to see that they can trust what you’re saying, as you have previous experience, qualifications, education or achievements in this industry so that they can see you as a point of authority and trust what information you are conveying to them.
Another major pillar is our fifth pillar, which is content. Your website’s content is a huge ranking factor when it comes to not only search engine visibility but also other metrics like conversion rate, social sharing and being a link magnet. Focusing on top-quality content that has a proven formula and gets traction will always be a major way you can boost your search engine rankings and also get a better brand reputation.
Without any text-based content, it’s going to be extremely difficult to rank for any search engine results. You need text on your page, and that means having a plan for how you intend to create better content than others that are also in your marketplace. Just copy and pasting content won’t work because it must be unique and valuable and also have some original ideas if it’s going to make it to the top of the search engines and get attention from users.
With this advice in mind, you can also take way too much time and effort into what you think will be an incredible piece of content only to find out that 3 months later it has no traction, no one reads it, no one clicks on it, no one shares it, it gets buried deep in search engine results and you have just wasted time, effort and resources by trying to predict what the market wants.
Some of the elements of content that you are in control over may just be the key to getting good rankings with search engines, so spending some time and coming up with some top-quality ideas as well as publishing some more generic content is a good plan. Perhaps aim for a ratio of 90% generic content and 10% unique value content; after all, if you evaluate your competition, you will be able to find that some content is just more popular than others, and they are able to tie them all together to gain search engine traffic.
The first thing to consider when it comes to content is to aim to create high-quality content; it should be helpful for the users of your website, and you should start by thinking about the target audience of your site or what kind of problems your customer might have. From there you can either start writing or do some further keyword research. Either way, your content should be well-written and also be formatted to make it easier to read and also be free from errors.
In order to reach your target audience and rank well in search engines, you must understand how to use keywords effectively. This means that you should sprinkle some keywords into your content to ensure search engines know you are aiming at this topic, but also don’t go too overboard; after all, your website visitors are the most important thing to focus on and not search engine rankings.
You must also have a consistent update schedule; you want to ensure that freshness is taken care of by producing content on a regular basis. A great example of this would be publishing some findings regarding the latest Google update, as this would signal you are putting out fresh and up-to-date content rather than just old and recycled information. Keep improving your content and be sure to update older pages any time new information becomes available. You should also ask for feedback from site visitors and implement new ideas whenever you get feedback.
Another element to tackle is how relevant the information is; in this case you want to create content around a keyword but don’t just leave it at that. Assume you are writing about a topic and combine a few pages of content into a thicker page that covers the entire topic in greater detail; this will impress your site visitors and search engines and save time for people who are searching.
You should also avoid modern marketing tactics that generate quick clicks but fail to deliver on promises, avoid using clickbait titles or tactics and avoid creating a 5,000‑word article which doesn’t give an answer that the user was promised; instead, create a quick summary at the top of your page which gives fast and direct answers. A bullet point format is a good idea and may give you additional traction with AI, followed by a more in-depth explanation for those who want an extremely deep and detailed answer.
Your content depth is another thing to consider; one of the biggest mistakes is aiming for a certain word count, as this always means you will do just about enough to make it over that number count, and this can lead to unanswered questions and very thin content. Instead of doing this, you should work on the idea that every word you type is creating value for the internet, and one strategy when creating content is to just ignore search engines and best SEO guidelines altogether and just focus on answering the question that the searcher is seeking while passing on some of your own and cover the topic and answer questions but also explain why this answer makes more sense than previous answers.
It’s way better to create a unique article or blog post than to reword a piece of content and add nothing unique to it. You can look at other content as inspiration, but ultimately if you want to build your own brand, then you need to express your own thoughts and have your own unique selling point and branding message that helps your website stand out. Finding ways to add more value than what already exists is a good method.
Another method to increase value in your content is to create it in different modes. Having audio and video embedded onto your site is a great way to stand out from the crowd but also enables people to listen or view your content without needing to focus on the screen. This is helpful to users who may be doing work or another task but still want to learn from your site. An easy win here is to create an audio version of a long article on your site and allow people to listen to your content instead of reading it. This takes your existing content and reworks it into a new format and also helps you increase vital stats such as time on site, which indirectly will help you with SEO rankings.
Overall with just a few tweaks to your content strategy, you could increase your rankings, but at the same time the best advice is to put the user first in your mind and keep search engines second. Never create a piece of content just because you think it will rank well or you want to keep your site up to date; instead, start thinking about how I can add real value to the internet and my market sector and brainstorm new ideas rather than just going the traditional keyword route.
Our sixth pillar is code. This is not something that most inside of the SEO industry give too much time to, but again, some small tweaks can really boost a website’s performance over time, so putting in some time and effort into this area is a good idea if you want your site to succeed in the long run.
No end users will see your website’s code, but so many sites contain poorly coded technology which ends up failing and costing money due to data loss and broken trust with the user. The fact is that when end users encounter a poorly coded site, they simply click the back button and go to your competition, so getting this right and set up correctly from your site’s launch is a wise move.
Having clean and valid code means you should at least have a basic understanding of programming languages that are used online, such as HTML, JavaScript and Python and have an understanding of how these elements may interact with SEO tags and page load times.
Ensuring that your code is properly done and has valid coding standards will help you to gain a better user experience for site visitors but will also help search engines and AI LLMs to be able to get access to the information about your website and to be able to understand what keywords you are targeting.
Title tags are one of the first things that both search engine users see and also what search engines use to categorise your page and placement within search results pages. A good title tag will have your keyword in it but will also help the user to understand the overall tone and content of your page before any clicks take place. This is considered one of the most important SEO tweaks that you can make when it comes to your on-page strategy.
Descriptions are another element that we can track, measure and improve. Stats inside of Google Search Console allow us to measure click rates and impressions, so we can use this data to test and tweak to find out how to improve click rates, which means we no longer have to rank number 1 for that search query; instead, we just improve visibility by utilising a well-written META description tag to get more clicks and gain some easy wins.
We can also look at heading tags such as everything from H1 tags all the way down to H6 tags. These tags offer various ways in which we can get some keywords onto our page but also split up the page into different sections which can be scanned or be scrolled to when using a table of contents like online encyclopaedias have. Headings are a great place to include keywords but also emphasise your business’s brand name and include some other words that may pique interest in your readers’ minds.
Getting well-written header tags and ensuring you include them on a page is perhaps the easiest way to win when it comes to doing a small amount of work but having a huge impact. In this case we can see that SEO has evolved from targeting only one keyword per page to targeting multiple keywords using clever formatting of heading tags and keyword research content paragraphs.
The next tag we can look at is the image alt tag. This tag is often overlooked when it comes to how powerful it can be. Getting a well-written image alt tag can provide visually impaired users with a text description of an image, which improves your site’s usability but can also provide you with new rankings in the form of image SEO. When someone searches Google Images, you may find yourself ranking well even if you may not be ranking well in the traditional search results. Most companies don’t take enough time to work on this tag, but it can be a quick way to boost rankings.
The last thing we can look at is schema tags, which are a way we can visually stand out in local searches. These give us some further insights into the page content, but we can also show things like price tags, stock levels and rich product snippets, which are extremely important for e-commerce sites, but we can also implement them into our local SEO efforts by implementing star ratings, reviews, opening hours and a phone number.
Overall this pillar will have a great effect if you take your time and study the tags but also come up with creative ways to write them to get you a boost; just including them on your site may no longer be enough to rank for local search terms, as the amount of competition is becoming much higher day by day, and they are all becoming very savvy when it comes to optimising for the search engines and getting their businesses found online.
Our last pillar to look at is site architecture, which is vastly important as it determines how easy web crawlers will be able to navigate and index your website but is also extremely useful for website visitors. A bad site structure means you may have a large bounce rate and a huge error log because people no longer stick around for long if a website is difficult to use.
The first element we can look at in a site’s architecture is ensuring our website is easy for search engines to crawl; they should be able to get access to all of the content that you have written and be able to understand it. You should run a crawl audit and take frequent steps to understand how you might be able to make it easier for search engines to crawl your site.
An example of how to improve your site structure might be things like creating a shallow hierarchy, which means having your important pages only 2 or 3 clicks away from your homepage; you should also group your pages into topics and related clusters and keep a document of your site structure. It’s wise to look at other sites in your market to gain some ideas for a logical site structure that would be easy to crawl.
You could also do other things, such as producing an accurate XML sitemap and submitting this to search engines via Google Search Console or any webmaster tools you may be able to access. Make sure your robots.txt file doesn’t block important parts of your site, and you should also produce a static HTML sitemap to keep things low tech. There are many plugins and websites that can create sitemaps with ease and are often free of charge to use.
Another step might be to fix duplicate content issues and ensure proper implementation of canonical tags, which helps you to avoid multiple pages indexing the same content. You should also audit and look for things like session IDs, excessive URL parameters or any site feature that might be able to generate huge URL permutations.
Improving your internal linking process will also help, as it goes a long way to ensure that you don’t have any orphan pages. An orphan page is a page that is not linked to anywhere on your website so that search engine spiders can discover it. A solid internal linking system also makes it very easy for search engines to find and crawl your site. If you want help to improve crawling, then you can use software options like Screaming Frog, which will go a long way to finding and diagnosing problems such as broken links, redirects, noindex issues and more.
Taxonomy is another element we can edit to achieve better results; in this case it gives search engines a clear idea and a scalable framework for page production. The end goal of a good taxonomy includes reducing crawl waste, boosting topical authority and improving end-user UX. Part of your process should be understanding how to map out a website structure that makes it easier for search engines and end users to find your content while ensuring good crawl metrics for your most important pages and site sections. Ideally you want to ensure your URLs are human-readable and your site structure is very easy to understand and navigate for both site users and search engines.
You should watch out for metrics such as the number of indexed pages vs how many URLs are contained in your sitemap; this will give you an idea of how well search engines are indexing your site and may give clues into how you can improve this process. Ultimately you want search engines to crawl and index as many of your pages as possible, especially if they contain vital information or they are product pages that could lead to additional sales. The sooner these pages are indexed, the sooner your search visibility can go up and the sooner you can start ranking for keywords.
Another section to look at is page structure. A lot of search engines are starting to punish sites for having an excessive amount of ads above the fold and also to punish sites that have pop-ups loaded that obstruct the main content areas. These are a problem for search engines, as they create a barrier for the end user, and it becomes a real issue with bounce rate. Try to create a website that allows for advertising to be on your page but in an easy-to-view way; it should not disrupt content, and you want to avoid placing it around other main clickable areas to reduce the amount of accidental clicks.
Mobile-first is rapidly becoming a huge topic inside the SEO world due to the fact that way more searches and web visits are done on mobile platforms, so putting some focus on this area and having your design team think about how sites will be used on mobile platforms is a great idea, but ideally your site wants to look great on mobile, tablet and desktop. You need to have a responsive design so your site can adapt to different screen sizes and input devices.
URL structure is also something to take a long look at. A good URL structure should be kept simple and obvious. When dealing with large sites, you want to break them up into a good and logical directory structure; this should make it obvious to a user which directory they are in but also make it easier for search engines to read your structure and allow them to read your structure quickly.
In order to make search engine-friendly URLs, you should also include keywords in your URLs which help to describe the content of the page and also to rank you much higher in search engines because including keywords in URLs means you can tell search engines you are targeting this topic. Make sure you keep your URLs as simple as possible, but with large sites with millions of pages, this may not always be possible, and you may need to include numbers within a URL to keep it tagged and have a number to reference when it comes to your internal system. This is not recommended for smaller sites, but even if you have a vast range of pages, you want to include keywords very early in the URL and try to get them as close to your domain name as possible so search engine spiders can read them faster when scanning.
Canonicalisation is another consideration when it comes to important SEO tasks; understanding the use of the canonical tag and when to use it is critical. This tag allows you to show search engines the original page that you want to include in the index and also helps you to avoid duplicate content. It allows you to consolidate multiple URLs that may have the same content into one URL and tells search engines to only crawl and list this page instead of reading and indexing multiple versions. This allows crawlers to understand which pages to prioritise and which to leave alone.
You should always take notice of any drop-offs in organic traffic after you implement these changes to avoid making mistakes. You can also use software such as Screaming Frog to scan your site and note down any duplicate content that exists that you can fix using canonicalisation.
Another change you can make is called the process of pagination, which gives you a great way to split up large amounts of content into multiple pages. This is especially useful on product category pages or to show internal search pages. A product category page may contain thousands of items, so displaying all of those items on a single page means you will nuke the load time for both search engines and users; instead, you need to split it up into smaller bite-sized chunks to improve load times and reduce the amount of data you need to send to the browser.
This can also be used on content such as lists and message board threads; again, content can be thousands of items or a huge wall of text and images, so learning to split these up into bite-sized chunks allows both search engines and users to read these items easier and retain the information.
A good way to implement navigation here is to use navigation link bars such as ‘previous’ or ‘next’ page or perhaps implement page numbers such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This navigation is good practice for search engines and users. The last thing to avoid here is to have duplicate content on any page; instead of showing duplicate content, you want to show unique meta tag data such as a unique title and unique description, and also create some new text on the page. It would be a good idea to keep things fresh and help that page rank well.
You can also implement the newest technology to solve this problem, which is the infinite scroll option. While this may look cool and is an easy way to solve the problem, it can also come with some setbacks that you need to be wary of if you use it on your site.
The issue here tends to revolve around indexability because search engine bots typically don’t trigger user scrolling, so content may not be indexed by them. To solve this issue, make sure each content segment is available via an indexable URL.
You should also watch out for the overuse of JavaScript since this causes problems with indexing, but another real problem is how it will show up with analytics and other traffic monitoring software, as the infinite scroll option can cause wrong numbers inside pageview metrics, which may make your site look more popular than it actually is.
Another consideration might be performance; the infinite scroll can wreak havoc when it comes to memory usage and CPU usage on mobiles, which can cause crashes if not correctly tested. You should always test your sites on a wide range of devices before you officially launch them.
The last consideration when it comes to site architecture is using HTTPS. Ensuring that a website is using a secure connection is now pretty much a requirement to rank well on Google and other search engines; it’s a signal of trust to Google as it shows that you take user privacy seriously. Not only that, but modern browsers warn users about visiting insecure sites and show “not secure” messages, which affects bounce rate and commercial performance.
Using HTTP provides no search boost, and you may actually get penalised for not having a secure website; you will likely also get a “not secure” warning, which will reduce trust from site visitors. Overall it enhances user and search engine trust when you have HTTPS.
Now that we’ve wrapped up the 7 pillars, it’s time to start implementing a plan. The best thing to do is take 1 pillar at a time and make some changes that are outlined in this article. There are many quick wins here, but some may take longer than normal, so make a plan that will take place over a number of months or even a few years. All things outlined here might take longer than you think, but implementing them will lead to a large uptick in SEO results.