When it comes to search rankings, most people who think about it feel there is an easy way to get those rankings. In short, they feel they make a tweak and bam, their rankings go through the roof. When it doesn't happen, they feel that they are missing out on a silver/magic bullet.
Google's John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Help thread that there often isn't a magic bullet. That often a single tweak made to a web site will not lead to significant ranking changes for the better. John explained that there are hundreds of ranking factors, so making a small tweak won't likely lead to increased rankings.
John wrote:
Often there isn't a single "tweak" that can be made to a website to automatically make it jump up in rankings -- we use well over 200 factors in crawling, indexing, and ranking, and it's always good to work on the small things as well. When looking at the bigger picture, it's useful to really take a step back, and to try to see what could be changed overall to improve the quality of the content (when it comes to our algorithms), especially with regards to the content that's indexed.
There are times where making a small tweak can have a huge impact. For example, if you are given an old aged site that has tons of quality content on it but never had any unique title tags. I.e. the site said, "MyDoman.com" in the title. Changing title tags to the article headline often can be a huge silver bullet. That being said, hard to find sites like that today.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto
