Magnetic^TM

In recent years, SEO has gone through many tumultuous changes. From the Panda update which uprooted many sites to the implementation of social metrics, it’s clear that SEO ranking factors aren’t staying stagnant. However, in spite of all these changes, the underlying fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed.

These immutable fundamentals have been the same from the early days of SEO until now. In fact, they’ve only become more and more important as search engines have gotten smarter and smarter.

These are the four immutable laws of SEO.

==> Law #1: Content Is King

Google’s goal since day one has been to help the best content on the web find its way to the top of the search engines. As Google gets smarter, it’s only going to do this better and better.

Trying to game the system is not a very good long-term strategy. It’s extremely, extremely rare for people to be able to game search engines for any real length of time.

Instead, the best way to get ranked in the long run is to provide content that people genuinely like and want to share. This will generate organic backlinks, which Google loves.

==> Law #2: Think Long Term

Short-term SEO thinking is not only ineffective, it’s also extremely unhealthy.

People who try to get ranked in weeks rather than months inevitably get burned.

The methods you employ when you’re thinking long term versus short term are different. In the long run, you’ll lay much more solid foundations with long-term thinking than if you were just trying to get ranked as fast as possible.

Get in the habit of thinking in six months to a year in terms of your SEO goals.

==> Law #3: Understand the 80/20 of On-Page SEO

It’s easy to get sucked into on-page SEO. When it comes to on-page SEO, it really comes down to doing the 20% of work that’ll give you 80% of the results.

Webmasters can get fixated on many of the little things on their websites. Should you use bold or strong tags? How much effort do you need to put into your alt tags? The list goes on and on.

Realistically, there are really just a handful of on-page factors that will make most of the impact. Your keyword selection, your title tag, your H1 and H2 tags and your internal linking structures make up that 20%.

Understand the best practices for each of these things and implement them. That’ll take care of 80% of your on-page SEO.

==> Law #4: Have a Scheduled Link-Building Plan

Don’t just build links when you feel like it, or when you want to boost your rankings. Instead, keep building links all the time.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time on it. A couple hours a week is enough. Keeping your link-building engine up and running at all times will help you look more organic in your link building. The results also add up very quickly.

Create a weekly action plan for link building. Use the plan to keep up your link building, even when you have other things going on.

These are the four immutable laws of SEO. Follow these laws and you stand a strong chance of winning the search engine contest in the long run.