Everyone’s talking SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And many large, medium and small businesses are reaching out to SEO consultants to get them more web traffic—without really understanding what these services are supposed to do or what they entail.

As hard as it pains me to say this, as an SEO myself, SEO and keywords alone won’t get you sustained traffic and visitors. Creating and maintaining a winning website is more about understanding human search behavior. Take this recent article from searchengineland.com, it points to the top 10 traits that most top performing websites have in common:

1. They understand human search behavior, the reasons why people find and stay on a website.

2. They have invested in strategic information architecture.

3. They develop and deploy high-quality content on a regular scheduled basis.

4. They understand that a quality user interface is vital to successful user experiences.

5. They conduct usability tests and understand that human search behaviour changes.

6. They don’t let technology gimmicks impact the user experience in a negative way.

7. They know that SEO page markup needs to be based on quality content, not gimmicks.

8. They understand how crawlers and search technologies impact content find-ability.

9. They understand that a first-page search engine ranking has to do with high-quality content.

10. They understand strong search rankings have to do with first building a superior user experience.

Are you keeping all these factors in mind when developing your website strategy?