The reality of SEO is one of confusion and debate. In many situations, you’ll find a variety of credible SEO gurus disagreeing on whether a particular course of action is effective or useless – and sometimes, even whether it is a positive or negative. This can make building a successful brand quite difficult, as professionals providing conflicting advice will leave first timers confused about how to proceed.

Despite many disagreements and ongoing debates, some components of SEO being beneficial aren’t up for discussion. To ensure your SEO foundation is a strong one, we’ll be talking about which three tenets of SEO are absolutely required and tend to be most important for success.

Content Creation

The objective foundation of any successful SEO strategy revolves around the content offerings available on your website. You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king” in SEO discussions before, and you’ve heard it for a reason. Without a solid, comprehensive and high-quality basket of content to provide audiences, why else would anybody come to your website? Search engines know this and it is why they prioritize the ranking of websites that have detailed and informative content alongside any other offerings (such as product pages).

By pinging to Google and other search engines a steady flow of content, you will accomplish the single biggest element of building an effective SEO strategy. While optimizations for said content are obviously necessary to maximize its potential, a general rule is if you write for your audiences, you won’t be disappointed with the long term results.

Link Building

Since the beginning of the internet, links serve as a way for search engines and users alike to navigate the world wide web. Ultimately, associations between pages and websites convey a lot of information to search engines: they help underline context as well as intent. As such, link building remains a vital component of SEO and is easily among its top 3 most important components.

There are many methods of link building that have emerged and faded from use over the years. In general, earning backlinks from other websites and citing your content are the most valuable strategies. It’s important to understand what search engines consider to be black hat tactics with regard to link building, as websites discovered engaging in these behaviors can set back their SEO plans via penalties.

Site Optimization

Improving the overall structure and functionality of your website matters immensely when concerned with both user experience and SEO alike. Various elements must be tweaked to ensure each page is connected to the others and allows crawlers that are pinging to Google easy access. Title and meta elements should be optimized as well to ensure search engines know how to classify your content. Integrating key elements such as keywords and sharing options improves performance both in terms of SEO and user experience.

Given that user experience is a prime criteria for search engines, site optimization is a cornerstone because it tells search engines that your website is easy to use.

These three components form the backbone of any broader SEO strategy. By ensuring your pages and overall site are optimized, content is of the highest quality and links are being generated, you’ll find that the finer points of SEO are easier to handle and that your efforts will naturally produce better results in the long term.