Where to begin? Link building. Keyword research. Site audits. On-page SEO. Updating pages for relevancy. All are important. By the end of this article, if we did our job, you’ll understand all of them!

Think about it this way: the internet is made up of two things—content, and links between content. When search engines first started indexing web pages, they needed a way to determine which pages were most relevant to certain queries—a system of ranking. The quality and number of backlinks pointing to a page immediately became a factor in determining that page’s rank. Backlinks represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. The more quality backlinks your page earns, the more valuable it is in the eyes of the search engine, and the more likely it is to achieve a high ranking.

A website’s domain authority corresponds directly to its ability to rank in the search engine. Conceptually, you can think of domain authority as an extension of link equity. If a page’s link equity is determined by the number and quality of its links, then a site’s domain authority is determined by the link equity of all its pages.

Redirects are a natural part of linking between content on your site. That said, 301 redirects pass anywhere between 90-99% of link equity (read: ranking power) to the redirected page. So, if you’ve moved a piece of content between several different pages, and all those redirects are still in place, you might be sacrificing some load speed/link equity. It’s a good idea to eliminate those superfluous intermediaries.

Still, not all redirects are created equal. 301 redirects, in which a page is moved permanently, are the most SEO-friendly redirects. They pass between 90-99% of link equity. 302 redirects, which indicate a temporarily redirected page, pass less link equity (though some Google employees have disputed this). Meta refreshes are redirects that take place on the page level, rather than the server level. These are most commonly associated with the text, “If you are not redirected in five seconds, click here.” Meta refreshes pass some link equity, but are not a recommended SEO tactic.

Well, as is the answer for many SEOs: it depends.

Long gone are the days of launching a website, optimizing your title tags, and ranking in a few weeks. You can't launch a website and expect it to rank for competitive search queries overnight. It takes time for a website to perform organically as Google ranks relevant sites that have built up authority.

You need to earn your way to the top of Google and deserve to be there.

You've probably heard horror stories about duplicate content. Many SEO beginners are often confused and concerned about what this means. In simple terms, duplicate content is where content is duplicated either between two or more websites or two or more internal pages.

Here, content can mean written content, title tags, meta descriptions, or H1 tags. We found this to be one of the biggest SEO mistakes that marketers make in our recent study.

Link building is about quality rather than quantity. You should never set your sight solely on building as many links as possible. This will only leave you feeling disappointed with the results. When you focus on numbers alone, the quality of links will inevitably drop. And that's the wrong way to approach link building.

You need to emphasize earning quality links at scale, being sure to never sacrifice quality for quantity. Scalable tactics, such as digital PR, can help you earn links at scale from quality and authoritative sources.