Most ranking advice is either obvious or obsolete. These are the practices that have survived the last three core updates.
Most SEO advice ages badly because it describes tactics rather than the reason they worked. These are the practices that have survived the last three core updates, and why.
Match the page to the intent, not the keyword
A page targeting "project management software" that reads as a definition will lose to one that lets someone compare options, because the people searching that phrase are shopping, not studying. Look at what already ranks before writing: the current results are the clearest statement you will get of what the engine believes the query means.
Fix crawl waste before chasing links
Faceted navigation, session parameters and paginated archives routinely generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs. On one ecommerce audit we found 94% of crawl budget going to filter combinations nobody had ever landed on. No amount of link building compensates for a crawler that never reaches the pages that matter.
Internal links are the cheapest ranking asset you own
They are entirely within your control, they need no outreach, and they tell the engine which pages you consider important. A hub page linking to twelve related articles, each linking back, will usually outperform the same twelve pages sitting unconnected.
Treat Core Web Vitals as a tiebreaker
Speed rarely takes a page from position 30 to position 3. It regularly decides which of two comparable results ranks above the other, and it reliably affects whether the visitor stays once they arrive — which is the part that actually pays.
“The best marketing decision we made was agreeing what success meant before anyone spent anything.”
