How to SEO in 2016 - a list of the most important factors

I thought backlinking was dead ... I used to have about 100 of them at 1 stage ,then everything changed and my backlinkers started to dwindle.I think I had about 6 left when I decided to stop completely and remove from my site as 100 of requesters were spam

Not at all. Links pointing to your site is still the number 1 Google signal that determines how popular/authoritative your content is, which in turn dictates your ranking position.

What has changed is the way back linking is done.

The old days of having thousands of spammy backlinks pointing to your site are over, or at least according to Google.

So it's down to quality versus quantity.

eg, in theory, 1 link from the BBC and 1 link from the Daily Fail would give you more authoritative and back link kudos than a 1000 spammy links.

Likewise the days of reciprocal links, ie you link to me and I link to you are over. It's perfectly ok to have some reciprocal links, and Google would expect any genuine linking profile to have some, but it's no longer a strategy to build links. So if most of your links are reciprocal, then it will work against you.

Google wants us to live in a Utopian web where people genuinely link to your content because they feel it was useful, quality or needs to be seen by others. Every time someone does this, it sends a message to Google that your web stuff is tip top, and you get a push in the right direction. They claim we are there now, but plenty of other people claim otherwise and seem to be still successfully gaming the search results with spammy links 

But it's a dangerous strategy and things have changed significantly since the Penguin Algorithm.  

If Google suddenly see a barrage of links pointing to your website from spammy locations, or dubious or same keyword driven anchor text, then it will work against you and you will get beaten with a stick, or in Google speak, beaten with a Penguin 

Didn't read the report, sorry, but there's no logical reason why bounce rate should affect ranking. Using bounce rate in the algo wouldn't be consistent with how the Gorg do things.

1. Google does not have access to universal bounce rate data so are unlikely to use bounce rates.  All they have is the back button stats (and GA... which they say they don't use). By their own admission, back button ain't no good metric.

2. A quality article with thousands of words is good, right? It gets a higher rank. It answers the visitor's question comprehensively. Visitors tend to close their browser after reading this page i.e. higher bounce rate. Why would Google "penalise" the page for being so great? It doesn't add up.

This is an argument that has been rolling around for years.

In 2013, Matt Cutts, the then public face of Google specifically said Google doesn't use a site bounce rate as a signal, and Google has said they don't use the data from our Google Analytics.

But..

There seems to be a growing argument for "back button stats". Google is ever increasingly refining search results based on user behaviour and type of queries. They have a mountain of data that can tracks user behaviour, and someone that enters your site from Googles index, then bounces back to the search index very quickly and searches or looks for another result with the same query, will arguably now carry weight. So nothing to do with GA data, just the Google God/Gorg analysing user behaviour.

The otherside of the same argument is that it's quite easy to manipulate by making a wow factor, titillation, or browse bait content to keep the user on your page regardless of his original search query. Off piste or aimless meandering being something we are all guilty of. This is personally where I am, so I'm also less convinced how or if bounce data is perceived and used.

Long and quality content is another one that seems to fuel two arguments. If it is a thorough, deep or interest article that grips a visitors attention, then are they going to "bounce away" from that page when complete, such as your closing browser argument? Or are they likely to be gripped and look for more quality content by the same author? If they book mark the page and revisit within 30 days, does that go from a negative bounce signal to a positive engagement signal?

As a straight forward directory, our bounce rate was horrendous and I used to obsess about it. But talking with other directory owners, it was clear we weren't alone. The consensus was that on a directory, particularly mobile results, a user finds the result they want, ie tel number or address and then disappear. So this is positive rather than negative.

But bounce stats are a useful to analyse in GA as they can point to problem areas in your site you might not have noticed.

The SEO bounce argument swings back and forth, which is what prompted me migrate our standalone vbulletin forum onto the directory. Since we did that, bounce rate has gone down, but traffic wise no difference. So I don't think personally it has much bearing, but the bounce debate will no doubt rumble on for many more years

In ecommerce website, we optimized with our products not content. How can we promote this type of website without content? Because, Google like quality content optimized website for keywords ranking.