What is the most important part of SEO?

The most important part of SEO is good quality content that is relevant and useful to your audience.

SEO is highly dependent on content, it can only be done based on words and phrases in the copy. Yes, there are lots of SEO technical bits to take care of but, SEO cannot “polish a turd”. If your content isn’t good, no amount of SEO is going to make a big difference.

So work on your content first before all the other SEO factors.

Copy must relate to the keywords and phrases people are searching for.  The most effective parts of SEO are really about bringing the best out of your copy by highlighting the important words/phrases. If your content doesn’t contain any important words/phrases then what is there to highlight? This is the fundamental issue.

All the rest of SEO are just tiny adjustments that don’t really make a great deal of difference if the fundamentals are not right but can sound impressive when listed.  

Content has to be well written to rise to the top and lots of content creates more SEO opportunities.

What is the most important part of your content?

The Title.

Good titles (headlines) get your copy read. Poor titles get your copy ignored! Put a lot of effort into these.

Put your most important target keyword phrase in your title.

So content needs to be written with a specific intent in mind.  By that I mean think about your target search phrases (keywords) and write content with these in mind starting with the headline.

SEO choices: I am often faced with trying to do SEO based on content written without intent. It leaves me to guess what search phrases to optimize for and make a few minor changes to make the best of a bad situation. Or take the path of re-writing everything from scratch with intent.

So how do you improve your copy?

See:

• How to create smart Headlines that make a big difference. And
• How to write appealing copy for your website.