As we discussed before, many people say SEO is always changing. That what works last month or six months ago does not work today. While there is same truth to that, by and large it is actually not true because there are some fundamental, unchanging, core SEO principles.

Yes, Google’s algorithm will fluctuate a little bit at time. For example, one of SEO principles Google might count for thirty percent, but in the future might be thirty-five percent. But, this is not a change in their algorithm so much as a tweak to their current settings. In reality, the algorithm is not that simple. It is more conditional, and sometimes they have flags they trip, and for some people it might be thirty percent, while for others it might be fifty percent, but it will never go from thirty to ninety-nine or thirty to one percent. Not any time soon, at least.

Also, generally speaking, they say their changes affect about one percent of the total search results. That number is getting smaller and smaller, as there are only so many tweaks they can make without undoing some of their previous tweaks. Earlier on, they had some big updates.

Below are the 5 top SEO principles you should keep in mind when doing SEO.

1. Relevancy – the most important SEO principles

First, they are always looking at relevancy. Relevancy is always going to be huge to Google. Otherwise, Facebook is the most popular site, Facebook would show up for every result, but it is not relevant to every result. Measuring relevancy, calculating the relevancy to a search phrase, to a concept, to a set of ideas, is always going to be important. You want to be able to make your site as relevant as possible, or seem as relevant as possible, to the people that you are trying to target.

Google’s main customer is not actually the people buying ads. Their main customers are the searchers. They want to answer their searchers’ queries as best as possible. They want to serve up the most relevant search results to their searchers that answers the searcher’s queries. That is their ultimate goal with all the search results.

That is why you should rank your brand name easily and well even without any SEO, especially if it is a unique brand name, because no one else is relevant to John Citizen’s Sydney Plumbing business, right? You search that and there is no one else relevant. This is how SEO Companies promising “guaranteed 1st page” are able to provide no value and still fulfill their guarantee, “see, you’re ranking #1 for your business name!”

2. Simple On Page

I am a big fan of simple On-Page SEO. The core SEO principles of on-page have been around for a long time and are going to be around for a long time. What you put on your page definitely tells Google who you are and what you are about.

There are only 3 simple things that account for 99%+ of what Google decides your on-page is relevant to: URL, Title, and interlinking. If you do these 3 things right (and they are pretty easy to get right) and nothing else, you can still rank really well.

There are all sorts of little things you can do, like tagging your images, moving text around, adding H1/2/3/4 tags, adding meta keywords and meta tags, and many more things that are essentially minutia in most cases. Ultimately, they have little to no effect on your rankings.

To a lesser extent, there are your H1 tags, the content, and your actual tags, categories, those are important as well, but they are very small. There is infinite minutia, and that is why you can get those automated website auto reports that give you an F even if you write well, because it is all these little things that technically help, but it is like throwing a piece of sand on the beach and saying, “Oh, I’ve made the beach bigger.” Technically, that’s true, but it is not useful. The beach is already there, you have already created it, and the most important pieces are already there. That is not going to change for a very long time.

Part of the reason why we see so many “experts” talking about the many different ways you can waste your time on on-page is because they don’t know what else to do with their time! They know little to nothing about off-page SEO, so they have to circle back around and work on what they know how to control, even if it does basically nothing for your rankings.

3. Engagement

Engagement is a huge one that I think is heavily misunderstood. I have a great case study for this where the engagement metrics for a specific search phrase for a site was really strong and it was impossible for anyone to remove that site from the number one spot. It was stuck to that number 1 spot because the engagement metrics that Google looked at said that this site answered that specific query far better than any of the other sites.

Engagement is important to understand, how Google measures engagement and what they can see.

For example, if someone is at that number one spot and someone else at the number two spot for a specific search phrase, and everyone who searches that search phrase clicks on the number one spot then they come back to the search results in three to five seconds, and then click on he next spot, and either they do not come back or they stay on the site for a long time before going to the number three spot, that number two spot is definitely going to outrank the number one spot at some point because it is clear to Google that the number one spot is really not answering the search query well.

Google is going to recognize and reward that number two site even if all the other metrics are better for the number one site. This is actually a trump card. If your engagement metrics are better than everyone else’s, you will keep your ranking. It is very difficult, if not impossible sometimes, for them to override it.

That is why when people say oh, the algorithm is this percent of this much and this percent this much, it is not really that simple. If you think about it, go back to the relevancy and see what Google really wants to show their searchers? They want to show them the most relevant results that answers the queries. If they are going to a site and they are not coming back, or they are spending a ton of time on it, much more than every other site they find, then Google is going to think, “Okay, this is clearly answering our queries.”

Google isn’t going to suddenly not look at engagement. Google has measured this for a long time and they are going to continue to measure it, they are not going to stop. Understanding how t get your visitors to stay on your site, to answer their quires, to have very specific landing pages for very specific searches phrases so that when they arrive on the site it is built just for them, that is all going to be important for a very long time.

4. Links

A lot of people say links is not going to be important in the near future and, according to Google, they are very wrong. Google has stated that they’ve tested algorithms in house that ignore links and the search results are terrible.

A large part of Google’s algorithm is essentially a popularity contest where the more people that reference you, and the more trustworthy those people are, the more they like your site. It is not sort of like them coming to a high school and automatically assuming that the quarterback of the football team and the head cheerleader are high in social standing and so they are going to take their word higher, or they are going to treat them and what they say is good with more respect than other people.

Do you remember Web Crawler? Web Crawler was a popular search engine before Google was launched, in the mid to late ’90s. I remember using it a lot. No search engine had come up with using links to help evaluate the value and trust of a site Google came along and they started using links. This was their big development. This was the major thing that enabled them to completely crush other people in giving much better and relevant results.

You need high-quality, relevant links that are as trusted as possible. This is not going to change. A lot of people doubt links are something we are going to need in the future.

5. Site Structure and Interlinking

This last one is key, and I never hear it talked about enough. When a lot of people talk about on-page they talk about all the specific things on an isolated page. What is really important, in a lot of ways more important, is how does that page (all your pages) fit into a grander plan to tell Google what are your whole site and parts of your site are relevant to.

When you give a theme to your site and sections of your site Google gives your site and your pages a BIG relevancy boost.

It is important to build what I call a conceptual tree structure on your site. A conceptual tree structure is essentially a map of all the categories, sub-categories, sub-sub-categories, etc. Where does everything fit on your site? Build it out so it is not just your home page and a bunch of pages that all kind of link to each other.

This organized fashion is something that is definitely not going away any time soon. It is very powerful now because so few people do it, and even less people do it well, or really understand the importance of it.

Essentially, what you are getting here are some of these lesser pages getting a relevancy boost because only relevant pages are set up to where they are linking to it and from it. This is important, to draw this from the very beginning. It also makes it so that when you create content it is within a bigger game plan where it really maximizes the power of content versus, say, random blogging about sort of related topics.

You have a site, and all these keywords you want to rank and write for, so you are just going to do a bunch of random blogging. Yeah, that is okay, but you could do it a lot better.

There are tons of undying SEO principles, but these are the main ones. Do not let people convince you that it is an upheaval every six or twelve months and that you have to completely change everything. There are fundamental things that, if you do right and do well, they are going to help you rank for a long time. I always incorporate these SEO principles in all my campaigns.

Question about SEO principles? Please leave a comment below.