If you're a website owner, one of your primary goals will be to optimize your site to ensure it ranks high on Google in order to increase organic traffic.
When it comes to optimising your website content and other on page factors, it's important to not only understand what can positively affect your rankings, but also what can harm them.
On one hand, not optimizing your site enough will mean Google won't see you as relevant, whereas over optimization will more than likely lead to Google marking your site down. For real search engine success, a delicate balance is required.
This isn't easy when you consider there are reportedly over 200 ranking factors built into Google's ranking algorithm. The big question is which of those do we have cast iron evidence to support, and which are outright myths?
Northcutt recently published some detailed findings which argue the case for each. They've labelled them on a sliding scale, with those that have been confirmed by Google as having an effect ranked as "Concrete" and those with no evidence at all ranked as "Myth".
You can read the details of Northcutt's extensive research on their website here - or you can have a look at an easier to follow summary in this infographic from Red Website Design.
This post originally appeared on Irfan Ahmad's blog