Link Building Is Not Always The Most Important SEO Factor

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

There are times when we pay too much attention to link building and not enough to the many other SEO factors that go into ranking well in the search results. This can be particularly true if we are trying to climb above one of our competitors in those search results.

It is quite easy to find information on our competitors. One piece of important information is how many backlinks your competitors have. If you find that you have far more backlinks than your competitor, yet still not outranking them, perhaps it’s time to start looking at other SEO factors.

Perhaps their content has a better ratio of keywords than yours. It could be you have too many keywords, or not enough. Other SEO factors such as page titles, internal links, the use of H1 and H2 within the content; these can all contribute to your overall search rankings.

You may need to dig deeper. Perhaps your internal links are not using the right anchor text or the URL is not keyword optimized. Sometimes, believe it or not, you are placing too much emphasis on the SEO factors and not enough emphasis on the visitor.

A web site can rank very well in the search results, however if enough visitors bounce away because of lousy content, then your ranking may suffer considerably. Checking your bounce rate is a must and it should be checked frequently as part of your SEO monitoring process. If it is high, try to reduce it by reworking your content so it aligns more closely to your keywords.

There are many areas that need looking at when it comes to SEO, don’t just concentrate on backlinks.