The 5 Components of SEO are Text, Link, Popularity, Size, and Time.
Text Component
Say you were to Google the phrase “how fast can a cheetah run” and Google showed you the result “Fastest Aquatic Animals….” You would think, “stupid google, that’s not what I searched for”. This is where the text component comes in. Google crawls a web page and stores the text of that page. When a query is made, Google searches for the pages that contain the text used in the search query. Making sure the targeted keyword is in the title tag, URL, header, and body text will greatly increase a pages chance of showing up in the results.
Link Component (aka Internal Links)
The link component refers to the internal structure of a website. Google expects a website to have more internal links to its most important content. If the internal link structure of a website gives the most links to a services page, Google is going to assume that’s the most important page on the website. If a page has lots of links and is easy to get to, this is a strong signal to Google of the importance of that page. This is important when designing a website. Often blog pages or contact us pages will have the most internal links on a website. This is usually an incorrect practice, and a change to the internal link structure should be made to make other pages, like the homepage, or a services page the most linked to page within the website.
Popularity Component (aka Links to Your Site)
One of the main factors that set Google apart from other search engines is how they integrate the popularity of websites into their search algorithm. To judge the popularity of a website Google uses links to that site. In general, a website that has more quality links has a higher popularity score. A quality link is a link that is relevant to the linked to content and from a reputable website, or a website that also has a high popularity score.
Size
It’s not a good practice to have a stagnant website. As has been stated before, Google cares about the freshness of a website. Part of being fresh is adding new content. As a site adds new content the domain will steadily grow. Google wants to see steady, consistent growth over time. There are many ways to increase the size of a website, but one of the easiest is through creating quality blog posts. For SEO clients, seek to grow the website by at least one page per month.
Time
Google gives more credence to websites that have been around longer. The older the website the better. Google will trust a website that has been around a while and proven its self with time more than a similar website that was created more recently. Unfortunately, we can’t travel back in time and create a website so there isn’t much we can do about time.