Quality content, link-building, social media, and on-page optimization – these are just a sampling of the many aspects of SEO. Depending on who you ask, you will get a different answer about which aspect of SEO is most important. You may feel overwhelmed with the SEO tasks ahead of you but you can prioritize your duties by following these simple steps.

Determine Your Goals

Want to know how to prioritize your SEO efforts? Start out by defining your goals. Whether you want to sell products or services, build brand image, or increase site traffic, you need to determine what your priority is and focus on the aspects of SEO that will help you achieve that goal. Once you figure out what your top priorities are, create key performance indicators, or KPIs. The more specific your KPIs are the better. When you have specific KPIs, you can easily determine whether you are meeting or missing your goals. Some examples of KPIs include the goals to get 1000 new newsletter subscribers in one month, sell 10 information products in one week, or rank in the top ten Google results for a specific keyword term.

When you outline your goals and create KPIs, you will know what strategies are required in order for you to meet your goals. The tactic you use will depend on the goal in question. For example, if you want to rank in the top 10 results for “dog shampoo,” one of the steps you'll want to focus on is link-building with anchor text containing that keyword. If you are trying to increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter, you may spend a lot of time creating and marketing killer web content that targets your particular demographic.

Decide Whether You Need to Focus on Quality Content or Link-Building

You may have heard that the most important aspect of SEO is link-building. This holds true more for new websites than old, established websites. Sure, links remain important no matter what but older sites that have already built up sufficient link authority can get pages ranked simply by adding new content and linking to it internally. On the other hand, if your website is relatively new, your on-page tweaking efforts will have minimal effects until you build link authority. Your basic on-page SEO factors such as optimized content, optimized title tags, crawlability, internal linking, and flat site architecture should be taken care of but your primary focus should be on link-building after that.

Spend Time on the Most Critical Aspects of SEO

Determining your goals and focus is important but no matter what your ultimate aim is, you should always keep the big picture. Pay attention to the most critical aspects of SEO, which are links, interesting content that is optimized for target keywords, crawlability, site structure and optimized title tags.

If you are in the early stages of SEO, focus your efforts on forging relationships with other people online in order to build links and attract traffic. Whether you are a newbie or a seasoned webpreneur, use target keywords in your title tags and make your site accessible for humans and search engines for better crawlability. And don't forget to provide your visitors with content worth linking to!

Take these simple steps to ensure that you head in the right direction for SEO success. Define your goals in the beginning so you can determine which strategies will give you the most “bang for your buck.” Nevertheless, don't neglect the critical aspects of on-page and off-page SEO in your quest for achieving specific goals.