Manick Bhan, CTO and founder of LinkGraph, decodes search engine optimization and discusses how you can start implementing real-world, data-centric tactics with the help of today's tools and technology. Listen in and hear how one of the brightest minds in Search is paving the way for a more transparent, actionable, and understandable future of search engine marketing.

From his chat with Kyle Kostechka, ClickBank business development representative, Bhan outlined a few foundational elements to SEO:

Authority: how authoritative does google view their website? PageRank is still relevant, so what does your backlink profile look like?

Content: it's all about the words on the page, an incredibly important ranking factor.

Page experience: how users interact with your landing pages. Are they staying on the page? Are they coming back to it? Are they hitting other links to go further in site.

Technical: on-page technical SEO, is your site technically sound.

Over the years, Bhan and his team have conducted several tests to hone in on how Google analyzes and prioritizes its search engine results pages. 

For example, they conducted a correlation analysis on search results for baseball tickets. Several factors were examined to see how sites rank in positions 1-3. It used to be that authority was the most important, but that's actually changed. Over time, other ranking factors have risen in relevance. Content, page experience, UX, technical performance all are increasing in importance. These factors make it so that search is becoming more democratic.