Is there an SEO activity that is more important than all the others? Is it link building? Social networking? Writing meta tags? Keyword research? Looking over analytics reports?

Actually, it’s none of those. The most important SEO activity that you can perform at any time is content creation.

That’s right. As simple as it sounds, content creation is no mundane activity. It is the heart and soul of SEO. Without quality content there is nothing else that you can do that can make your website’s SEO effective.

All the link building in the world is fruitless if you aren’t producing quality content on a regular basis. What good is analytics without content? Why are you networking if you have no content? Meta tags without content is senseless. Yet, many webmasters spend a great deal of their day engaging in one or more of the above activities without producing any new content.

When you produce new content for your website you are telling your website visitors and the search engines that you take their concerns seriously. I’d rather spend an hour writing more content than two or three hours on each of the other activities combined.

If you aren’t creating new content every day – even if it’s just one article – then you aren’t really doing SEO.