In other words, SEO is basically knowing what is Google looking at when deciding which pages to rank and in which order.
Tip:
When you see Quora or Youtube search results showing up on page one on Google. It tells us usually that there is not a lot of content written about our keyword. and the competition is not very high.
Pasted from Reddit!!
https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/wvm6ah/cmv_i_believe_most_of_seo_tricks_and_tools_are/
Although no one knows how Google's exact algorithm does work, and as much as there are many changes made throughout the year, there are fundamentals that haven't changed in a long time that have been proven time and time again.
Authority / trustworthiness: This is through various factors, but primarily through other websites linking to you
Keyword usage and relevance: The article matching the search query
Content and quality: How correct, easy to understand, and relevant your content is
Page user experience: Is the page slow to load, do people click back right away, is it mobile friendly , etc.
Sure there is a lot of seo tools that aren't very useful or outright scams, but there are some that actually can help facilitate the above factors. You don't need fancy expensive tools to get results.
One of the biggest things that I've learned doing 4 years of seo is that if you're trying to "Beat Google", your going to have a bad time. How you should look at it is that you align yourself with Googles goals.
Google wants to deliver people the most relevant, trustworthy, easy-to-consume information as quickly as possible. Instead of trying to trick the system in any. way, do your best to take as many shots as possible that align with that goal. Not all articles or pages are gona hit, but the more you do it and the better you do it, the higher likelihood you have of ranking.
Do you, as a developer think about and change up metadata (including opengraph)?
Do you test what makes people want to click through?
How often are you looking at CTAs and language that works better?
Do you understand why schema markup is important to Googlebot and how it may activate other search result features?
Do you analyze what your competitor sites and product are doing and trying to meet or beat it?
Point being that a good SEO isn’t just a content and keyword monkey.
Many starting out learn that way because it’s easier.
There are a lot of bad SEOs, but there are people like me that look at the nuances of consumer behavior and technical ability that users and Google run into.
My point is that to call all of SEO snake oil is disingenuous.
There are a lot of shit SEOs, agencies, etc but there’s a lot of us that care and want to truly make things better!
And finally,
Google gives you 'sparse' data that works for very small sites, but anything larger would need someone that cares to look into things at a deeper level.
We’re meant to be more technical marketers.