A question I often get asked is this. “What’s the most important part of SEO?” It’s a fair question. After all, SEO encompasses a lot of things. You have on page and off page. And when it comes to on page, there are so many things involved, it can be overwhelming. And when it comes to off page, there are more things involved than most people realize. That is why this part of marketing is so misunderstood and so poorly handled. So even though the question itself is greatly flawed, let me try my best to answer it.

If you’re looking for a simple answer, the most important part of SEO is optimizing your site so that the search engines feel that it is relevant to what people are looking for and the people themselves who actually come to your site…agree. It doesn’t matter what one thinks without the other. Visitors can love your site but if the SERPs don’t agree, you won’t get listed high and people won’t find you. Conversely, if the SERPs love your site, but the visiting experience is an unpleasant one, your bounce rate is going to be sky high.

In other words, you have to please both of these entities. The question is HOW?

Let’s take a simple example. Let’s suppose that your site is a photo site. People come there to see photos of various topics. These topics can range from war photos to rock concerts. The first thing you want to do is make sure that every page is optimized for the SERPs for the keywords that people are searching for. To do this, you need more than just photos. You have to have very clear and distinct descriptions for each photo so that they can be easily indexed. Also, you want to make sure that the page title closely fits the type of photos on that page. For example, for the page with war photos, you probably want to name the page something like war_photos.html and have your TITLE tag something like “War Photos From 1914 To 1973″ This way, the SERPs know that these photos cover everything from WW I to Vietnam.

However, that’s just one part of the equation. You also want to make the visiting experience a good one. So you want to make sure that the photos themselves are nicely organized. Maybe have them in chronological order with the early photos at the top of the page and the later photos at the bottom of the page. This way, visitors aren’t jumping around looking for things. They can go right to what they are looking for. An hyperlinked index at the top of the page will greatly help in accomplishing this.

It’s a simple example, but a perfect one to illustrate how on page SEO needs to focus on both the SERPs and the visiting experience. While the SERPs may not care as much about the organization of the page itself, as long as the tags and keywords are all relevant, your visitors DO care. Too many marketers forget about the visitor and concentrate ONLY on the search engines. You need to do both.

And you need to do this for EVERY aspect of SEO… not just one or two.

So the answer to the question, though you are not going to like it, is simple… every part of SEO is important.

That is the reason why so many web pages never see the light of day.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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