People often have a general idea of what is involved in SEO, but they tend to focus on one or two particular variables. The truth of the matter is there are a lot more. Some are more important than others, but singling out specific ones ignores the long tail effect. The little things add up and can make a huge difference.

Here are all the things that can POSITIVELY impact your positioning, in no particular order:

• Domain name
• URLs
• Content and keyword density
• Number of pages
• HTML formatting
• Title tags, meta tags
• Internal linking
• External linking
• How long the site has been active
• Competition
• Frequency of updates

Conversely, here are things, exclusive of blackhat practices, that NEGATIVELY impact your positioning that can be easily avoided:

• Duplicating content within sites
• Duplicating entire websites
• The same title tag on every page
• No sitemap
• No custom 404 error pages

In general, we’d recommend sticking to GREAT content, clean code and healthy flow of relevant inbound links.