What am I missing to get my pages ranked higher?

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

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  Sam Mah: It sounds like you missed out one crucial factor, the promotion is the next big thing. Promote your site everywhere, including offsite.
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  Mari Sa: Where do you suggest? I have it in staff email signatures and on social media. How would that help with rankings?
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  Sam Mah: Mari Sa email signatures are okay if you offer them a reason to click. Otherwise, it is dead and useless. 😂
  
  Give some free t-shirt with a cute mascot with the site URL. Use people to help improve your direct traffic to your site. If I like the design, I will check it out online.
  
  Direct traffic is relevant to rankings.
  
  Links on Social Media profiles are useless if you don`t participate in helping others first.
  
  Get people to mention your online brand and this is also relevant to your ranking
  
  It seems like you expect the prospects to come, that`s wrong. Instead, you must reach out to them first. 😉
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  Mari Sa: Sam Mah Yes I expect them to come by creating good content for them. I could offer a free ebook download. Just have to come up with an idea for the book.
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  Sam Mah: Mari Sa that`s a wrong approach, you go up against a huge mountain. By the way, you still need to promote your free download 😉
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  Ammon Johns: Backlinks are still a major part of the algorithms, so you already know the single biggest factor you are missing. It is more about the power of a few backlinks than about the volume of backlinks, so concentrate mostly on how to seduce some really great backlinks - the kind you`d actually brag to non-SEO family about getting.
  
  Make a list of the kind of places you`d kill to get a citation/link from. Then research what they each have linked to before and see if you can make something like that just to seduce a link from them.
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  Mari Sa: Will do! Thanks! Any tips on how you`ve successfully seduced them?
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  Ammon Johns: Mari Sa I just gave you the best one there is. Come up with your dream list of the sites you would sell a vital organ to get a link from. Then research what they have linked to in the past - find out what they can`t resist, then you know exactly what you need to offer.
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  Mari Sa: Ammon Johns Okay thanks!
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  Ammon Johns: Mari Sa remember, you don`t need their link to be to the exact the page you need to rank, so long as what they do link to LINKS to the page(s) you want to rank.
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  Mari Sa: Ammon Johns Thanks!
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  Michael Rayburn: 1- Backlinks you have to have them. 2- to make sure your content really is on point and to see what backlinks your comp has in common you could use surfer seo. Decent software. We like it. It will answer all of those questions. See more and more each day the top 5 pages have content that displays certain words a specific number of times. It also will show you how long your content should be, and what LSI`s to use. If you are trying to rank a website it is worth at least the bottom level price of $59 a month. (No i am not an affiliate) They also have a free 7-day trial plan. You could give a try and see how it goes from there. Lastly links. What is your problem in trying to get links? I am happy to look and see if you are not doing something that you should be. Just DM me if you need a second set of eyes.
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  Ammon Johns: You were doing really well until you mentioned LSI there, Michael. LSI is a nonsense in terms of ANY SEO, as it has nothing to do with the web at all, far less search engines. It is used by charlatans (or those fooled by them) who never look beyond the word `Semantic` to look at what it actually does, or how it actually works.
  
  https://www.seroundtable.com/google-lsi-keywords-27970.html
  
  https://www.seobythesea.com/.../google-use-latent.../