You’ve heard the term ‘SEO’. You know it has something to do with your content reaching a larger audience. You’ve nodded politely when someone brought it up to you. You may or may not have already used it in a sentence, even though you weren’t 100% on what it meant yet. It’s okay, confidence is key and we’ve got your back!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is almost exactly what it sounds like. SEO is a method for writing your content in such a way that it will rank higher on search engines. It is essentially the science of getting better search engine results. Like any other form of science it’s constantly growing and we’re always learning more things about it.

Like many things in life there is no right or wrong answer. The number of keywords you should be using is entirely up to you and the needs of your business. However the magic number seems to fall around five.

Despite the differences in sites across the world wide web, this seems to be the sweet spot. Time and time again five seems to be the correct number to have your content come up in searches, without keyword stuffing. While it may seem arbitrary, the number five is actually great for you as a content creator. Finding good, reliable keywords will be hard enough. Keeping it to an average of five will give your page a healthy amount of traffic while keeping the language flowing freely. So aim for five. Your traffic will thank you for it.

No one likes to do a job more than once. And while it is easy to think that once you create a link that is the end of it, that’s not really the case. Links need to be revisited a little more than that in order to keep your traffic numbers up. Even though the Internet has only been around for a short while, we’ve already realized that links don’t age well.

Anyone who has revisited an old site they used to love can tell you that that’s the truth. Even what seemed like the most elegant, sleek choice at the time can come across as clunky and unnecessary later on. The same thing can easily happen with the links you use for SEO purposes. If your links age out and are no longer useful it can hurt your SEO standing. This happens simply because the links themselves will get less traffic over time. That’s why it’s important to update links at least every three to six months to keep your traffic fresh. This will ensure that you’re getting new traffic numbers to your site on a regular basis, instead of relying on the same population with your old links.

Zooming into the top 6 percent pages, most of them were able to get to the top 10 from nowhere in 2 to 6 months.

So, based on their findings, about 94 percent of the pages in the study never made it to the top 10 search engine rankings within a year.

While they sound similar, these two concepts are actually very different. A hyperlink is simply a linked keyword or website. However a backlink is a link to your website on a different page. An easy way to think about it is that a hyperlink is a link to any website. A backlink is a link to your specific website, on a different website.

These concepts are important because you want and need both of them. You need the traffic from the hyperlinks to come to your site. Similarly, you want the backlinks to bring traffic specifically to your site so you can cut out the middleman and reap the benefits yourself.