About 6 months before you realize that technical on page SEO is just about setting relevance and 90% of its int he document name (think the filename, the titles, H1) and that this cannot be changed. Think: if I have low authority – I am going to need pages with 100% Relevance : authority to get a chance at some pages ranking.
The following are froma list of 38 SEO myths I published in 2012 (still rank first for “top 38 myths”) and I think are highly applicable:
- SEO is not about technical performance – sorry but CWVs will not rank you higher, nor will having 0 errors
- Most of on-page SEO is in the document name, shaping authority between pages and earning it
- There are no bonus points for ticking check boxes – most of which are superstitions – like having an image/unique image, or author bios or schema (unless you have a specific fit: Flights, hotels, recipes but even still unless you’re an airline/airport most of them are …. not doing much)
- Google Bots do not “spider” and crawl the whle site “and evaluate it” – its a page-level system. Page A’s meta is X, send to snippet builder, send to indexer
High, Medium or Low Authority
You need to know if you’re starting as a low authority site or able to get massive authority link drops – like from a parent company.
A good example is that 99% of SEOs think an XML sitemap is 101 SEO or basic – yet they do nothing for low-med authority sites and the Google SEO dev guide is clear about this. Unless you have ample authority, Google won’t post a listener bot (akin to Bings IndexNow) – it might read your sitemap once a month.
TechSEO works this way
You actually need tiered authority along the way. If all your links go to your homepage, forget building a 5-tier site. Dampening in SEO literally kills 85% of authority from page to page. So Tier 3 is sending 15% of Tier 2’s 15% at best…. which is nothing.
Shaping authority and avoiding the 45% Un-Index rates that befall most big sites is a really big job that needs to be built into your site architecture…
If you think SEO is
- check content/meta
- Nice headlines
- a future content pan
- word count
- schema
- good, fast html
then you need an SEO partner now.
