What Factors most help SEO?

People often ask me what the biggest things that help SEO are. These are my observations at this point in time:

  1. Much content
    (optimized pages, a lot of SEO copy per page, blogs, videos – but even new/small websites need to be setup properly for search engine recognition)
  2. Lack of errors/spam
    (these days, spam bots & search engine errors are heavily hitting all websites; many companies aren’t even setup properly to see it, let alone fix it – we identify & fix all this)
  3. Domain/website age
    (the longer a company has had a website on their domain, the better; this is the only factor out of above that isn’t controllable, since domain re-sales change the ownership records; meaning a company needs to be more vigilant on the above factors to beat competitors)

Fortunately, there are tools and resources to identify above items, including a lot of the website/search engine errors, bad links, drops in search-engine traffic, low-quality/irrelevant keywords for the site, and competitive benchmarking.

Thanks, Jake Aull, Zen Fires Search Engine Marketing