Stop looking at third party metric proxies

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Caronda Hampton: Just took a quick look at it and it looks like your site could use more citations that give your domain power. A few more blog/guest post, and on secure site.
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  Tehseen Shamim: Caronda Hampton Thanks. My website is already secured as using https. I have ordered a gig on Fiverr for backlinks related to these keywords. Let see what the result comes out
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  Caronda Hampton: Tehseen Shamim Sure, I don`t mean your site but making sure the sites you are getting for citations are secure.
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  Mike Stewart: Tehseen Shamim you really ordered links on Fiverr
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  Richard Hearne: Yeah, this puts things into context... "... ordered a gig on Fiverr" is absolutely what you *DO NOT* want to do...
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  Tehseen Shamim: Richard Hearne pls guide, i am a novice and really need to learn these seo tactics. I want my website to rank high. Your guidance can help
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  Mike Stewart: Tehseen Shamim study the local search ranking factors and then expand from that. Also understand markdown syntax, page markup/structure/ and basic content strategy for local search etc.
  
  You need to focus on content before you move “off-site”
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  Tehseen Shamim: Thank you so much
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  Tim Capper: This is a great lesson in fact.
  
  All the metrics you mentioned are created by 3rd party external sources that have NO IDEA how Google ranks sites.
  
  Stop looking at crap metrics
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  Tehseen Shamim: Tim Capper Thank you. Would you like to give any tip on how to rank keywords. What would be the best way besides having quality backlinks
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  Doc Sheldon: Tim Capper ^that!
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  Mike Stewart: Tim Capper yeah, like do you even have location entity signals?
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  Michael Stricker: What Tim Capper said. And the title suggests that Google treats the query as a Quality Deserves Freshness search intent, which makes sense, as only the most recent versions of SAT Study books are likely to be helpful for shoppers, since the test changes every year. Your competitor uses the term, “latest”. Their page may use article dates, the year that the edition is published, the version of the test it covers, etc., all pertinent details. Out-of-date books may lack appeal. Think about it.
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  Tehseen Shamim: Michael Stricker Thanks for pointing out.
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  Sam Mah: Those scores are an indicator. It could be a user experience issue, power word, etc. Your competitor`s title tag seems much relevant to the searcher intent
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  Christine Hansen: Has it been like this for a million years or was it just something you came across today?
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  Zachary Toto: You`re comparing metrics that SEs don`t care about. When users search, what exactly is it they are looking for, and who delivers it better? This is what matters.
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  Sudhir Rawat: Work on url structure as well, your url`s are too long
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  Tehseen Shamim: Sudhir Rawat thanks for pointing out
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  Richard Hearne: Nope - unless your URLs are causing some sort of indexing issue it`s very unlikely that you`ll get any benefit from this. Sorry.
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  Richard Hearne: Look at relevance, page structure, UX, language usage, entity disambiguation. Stop looking at third party metric proxies...