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Which ranking signals do SEOs worry about too much?

Which ranking signals do SEOs worry about too much? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Seattle, Washington. Scared of Clowns wants to say, what ranking signals would you say SEOs worry about too much? What ranking signals should SEOs focus on the most? And bonus points if you can answer in concise bullets and without using the word quality. All right. Well, I just said the word quality, so I guess I don’t get the bonus points. But probably the ranking signal that SEOs worry about that they shouldn’t really be worried about is probably keyword density. You continue to see people who are little new to SEO come and say, what should my keyword density be? And focusing at that level of detail is not as helpful compared to reading it aloud, seeing if it makes sense, showing it to people, seeing if it makes sense, having natural copy that doesn’t sound artificial or stilted. That’s the sort of thing that I would concentrate on rather than my keyword density should be this. What ranking signal should people focus on the most if they’re an SEO? I wouldn’t focus on a particular ranking signal because what you want is to make your site compelling. So you want some service or some reason why people would link to you, why people would say that it’s good, why they would remember you, why they would seek you out. So an SEO should make sure that the content is crawlable. You want to have good URL architecture. You want to make sure that the site can be reached by just clicking on links. You want to have good titles. You want to make sure that you think about the keywords that people will use when they type in what they’re looking for. And make sure that you have those keywords on the page somewhere. But I wouldn’t focus as much on the actual ranking signals. Rather, I would concentrate on trying to make something that’s compelling. Because that’s the sort of thing that’s going to be really rewarding for users, and so is going to be the kind of thing that we would like to return in our search results. Hope that helps.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: