What factors affect SEO?

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1. Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric that shows how much trust your domain has built over time by a matter of backlinks and age. Similarly, the older your domain, the higher its domain authority. Another important factor that I've found is the relevance of the domain name in respect to the main keywords you are targeting. For instance, seoexpert.com will be more likely to rank better than lucysblog.com for "SEO" related queries. Lastly, a few of my SEO expert friends have reported that shorter domains will generally outperform longer domains.

2. Keywords
SEO begins with picking the right keywords (which you can very well find using Google's Keyword Planner or Ahrefs). My strategy here is to start by picking the medium to low competition keywords and then slowly build up my post to target more competitive terms. If you are looking to rank then you should definitely include LSI keywords (keywords that are synonyms to your target terms).
For instance, a site that talks about "portable chargers" can also include terms such as "power banks", "portable batteries for phones" and so forth. Make sure to include the keywords that you want to rank for in the title and in the sub-headings for perfect on-page optimization.

3. Relevancy and Context
Search engines are smarter than ever before. They do know the difference between a relevant page and a copied one. They can also distinguish whether just site is about oranges or protein bars. I recommend sticking to a niche when building out a site and catering content specific to that particular niche. For me, my niche is online marketing and SEO.

4. Number of Inbound and Outbound links
The more relevant links your website is pointing to, the greater your SEO score. Same goes for inbound links which are actually more favored, especially if they are coming from prestigious, relevant and popular sources. You can get backlinks by getting yourself featured on big news sites for example.

5. Site Speed
Google really cares about how quickly your site loads. To speed up your site you can use caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache or use a CDN to deliver your content in a faster way.

6. Clean and responsive design
best-optimized  websites are the ones that are clean, functional and responsive to devices of all types and sizes. In fact, Google even favors websites that have mobile-friendly design than ones that don't have.
If you are using WordPress, you can install the AMP plugin to have your site load blazingly fast. If your site is not using WordPress, you should learn how to make use of the accelerated mobile pages project by Google.

7. Length of your content
Whenever you are writing a blog post that you want to rank, you want to make sure you are going into as much detail as possible. Search Engines have been rewarding long-form content and in 2018, you won't rank unless you write at least 1500-2000 words per post.

source:https://alejandrorioja.com/blog/what-is-seo/