What is the most powerful technique in SEO?

Content is indeed important, but don't forget to optimise the page with keywords so the search engines can find your content. What is the use of content if it can't be be found by anyone? My number 1 technique is leveraging inbound links. So its more about ensuring other sites (through their links) think highly of your content by directing others to it.
It's a shame that the most important technique is often one of the most difficult to achieve since it is in the hands of others more than what you do on your own website.

SEO consists of many moving parts, and they are all intricate part of each other to complete the whole picture of SEO.

If you are referring to a technique in SEO, then Link Building should be the most powerful technique in SEO. However, Link Building can't just exists all by itself as the most important technique, where it entails many fundamental elements within. In order to implement the most powerful technique (doesn't matter if it is Link Building or Content, or anything else), you need to start with the basics (explained below):

Competitive Analysis should be the starting point of SEO. As far as SEO is concerned, this gives you the knowledge of what your competitors are focusing on, what keywords they are using, and/or may be dominating your market with.

Once you have these keywords, your keyword analysis, as well as keyword research should be the second step. This, not only provides you the most viable keywords that you should be using, it also helps you set up your targeted internet marketing strategy.

Having all this ammunition in hand, you are now set (to be able) to develop your unique, highly focused, optimized content (along with optimized titles, URLs, meta description, external linking, internal linking, optimized images, etc...)

Besides all this, (without going into too much detail) you also have to use more technical techniques (per se) in your on-page SEO, such as W3C, Site Map, Google Sitemap, Canonical, etc.

Once this is all done (in a nut shell), you are set with your on-page SEO. Then comes the Link Building, which is indeed a very important SEO Technique (to actually put you on the map).

At the beginning of my answer, I mentioned that Link Building entails many other fundamentals, and the most important one is, of course, your keywords! You need to have this to implement an effective link building campaign by using anchor text. Needless to mention, Link Building also involves other factors such as varying your keywords, you link profile, authority, relevance, to mention just a few.

Nevertheless, even though to my opinion, Link Building is the most important SEO technique, this doesn't mean competitive analysis is not, content is not, keyword research is not...! They are all important part of the big picture of SEO.

You asked for THE most powerful technique, and the answer is to have effective page titles. The title tag is the most important 72 characters you have on your web page. It weighs more heavily than anything else on your page in terms of SEO, so use it wisely.

Do not make common mistakes when using the tag. For example, do not have meaningless titles like "About Us" or "Products". About who? What products?

Also, do not repeatedly put the name of your company into the title tag of every page on your site. This is a worthless practice and wastes the available 72 characters you have. Instead of a title like "Zilch Storm Doors, Incorporated - Products" say "Insulated Aluminum Storm Door Products".

If you look up your Google listings and see that Google did not use your page titles, wise up. Google is sending you a signal that it did not like the ones you provided. Same goes for your meta description tag, which is #2 in importance.

Having great content.

You can agonize over keywords and let some SEO snake-oil salesman set up link farms for you but ultimately the most powerful way to get lasting SEO results is to have great and compelling content. If your site is THE site to go to for your topic people will link to it, discuss it, tweet about it, promote it and visit it.

And anybody who promises you they can keep you at the top of the Google rankings is lying to you.

It seems like only 3 factors matter in SEO:
1) domain age;
2) quality of backlinks;
3) relevance of keywords

Some powerful technique for SEO
1. Blog Comments
Every webmaster is familiar with the concept of blogging or commenting on blogs. It’s an easy way to generate quick, one way backlinks to your website. The key thing to keep in mind when blog commenting is the “Dofollow” and “Nofollow” attributes.

2. Forums Posts
Posting on forums is a great way to generate high quality backlinks, but it takes a little more time than blogging. Forums have the same concept as far as quality and content relevance but length can matter in this facet, along with number of posts, reputation of the profile, time length between posts, etc..

3. Article Posts/ Submissions
Articles are easy to write but the trick is to write an effective article that draws peoples attention and at the same time promotes your website or niche of choice.

4. Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is bookmarking pages you would like to revisit or share. You can organize, store, share, and manage your bookmarks through various social media sites.

5. Making Tools
This is arguably one of the best ways to build links and increase reputation among the online community. While it is not easy to think of a unique tool let alone design and create one, it is an extremely valuable asset to have in you tactical SEO belt. This tool can be anything from a free online widget, to a theme, a plugin, or even a unique tool with a more specific function. So if you have the skill set and ability to do this, I strongly suggest you take full advantage of it.

http://www.nichesuite.com/

While Google constantly changes their search algorithm, the one constant is their having to deliver search results that are the most relevant to a search query. How those results are determined is moving away from keywords and toward how many people or sites think the content on your site is relevant to the search topic and is current and fresh. Make sure that is how your site is set up and then make friends with other people's respectable sites who can place your site's link on their site or on their blogroll.

...Words are where the 'rubber meets the road' for Search Engines on the internet. People ask for content weighted heavily with specific words and the Search Engines go to elaborate lengths to parse the internet for sites that use those words heavily.

Knowing and employing key phrases in both content and important places (titles, URLs, headings, 'alt' tags, etc.) creates better results for your web presence.

Most organizations have lots of room for improvement... and no plan for making it happen.

I have three questions that I use to frame the teaching seminars and consulting services:
1- How do I get people *to* my website?
2- How do I get people *to do* what I want them to do on my website?
3- How do I get people to *come back* to my website?

Key SEO Technique: Tie your monthly SEO results review to your upcoming Editorial Calendar.

If you want to rank more highly for certain keywords, schedule blog posts around those keywords. Add articles (that use those keywords) to your Resources section of your website.

Content is the key for SEO currently. Make your content useful and unique enough that visitors will want to SHARE it -- and give them Sharing icons to encourage them to share and make it easy.

Social media shares are becoming more important in SEO. Tailor your content to your key personas, use the keywords they're searching for, and deliver great value to your audience.

The most powerful technique in SEO is still believe it or not keywords. There is a lot of
icing on the cake like link-building, to hide it, but keyword is still the most powerful. One
has to remember that it is a marketing ploy to make money, and so marketeer and salespeople
have to be creative at all time if they want to stay in the loop and increase sales. So hide it,
camaflash it, do what ever you want to do with it, keyword is still the most powerful.

Quality content is the best SEO technique. SEO – the process of preparing your web site to be indexed - is about putting your web site in the top positions of the search engines, with the hope of getting noticed by customers based on volume searches locally and globally.

Providing the right information in the right places makes all the difference in helping prospective buyers make informed decisions. We should be that business.

Keywords and quality content are the key SEO techniques. the quality content attracts more number of visitors to the site. blog content, article press releases are the major tools, where you have to use the quality keywords. In order to get the more visibility, improve the content and keywords. the inbound links optimizing also improve the page rank.

http://www.nichesuite.com/

1. Determine your buying keywords, or keywords that will accomplish your traffic goal. Traffic that does not convert is a waste of effort.
2. Place quality, original, relevant content on your site combined with quality, relevant content backlinked to your site using your keywords and placed on sites that have authority within your niche. 10 of these backlinks are far more valuable than 1,000 random backlinks with just your keywords placed.
3. Keep your content fresh by updating at regular intervals.

Google does change their algorithms from time to time but that is mainly to favor this technique and weed out practices that try to trick them.

As a 60 year old owner, this is to me the $64,000.00 question. I know that you have to have all the technology but who do you believe? If I had a dollar for every outfit or sales person that told me I would be on the front page of Google I could have bought Googel by now! To answer the question though I think you have to have 2 people. One, the IT person that knows the technical aspects of doing the job. The second person must be on staff and must be able to translate the technical stuff from the first prson into a language that they understand and that they can implament into your company needs. I can tell you from past experience this is not an easy task. One of the replies stated that this is a 4 to 6 month process. I would totally agree and even go so far as to say this will probably take longer. That second person that is on staff must do this as part of their job description. This is not a part time, I'll do it when I have time, function.
This is something that must be done on a daily basis.

Follow search engine guidelines, initiate link building, incorporate social networking while the signal dials are still on high, ensure web properties are W3C compliant, optimize graphics and consider what web professional have been saying for years: "content is king".

Agree with all of you. To sum up I think it would be:

"Great, worth sharing (off-page), keyword optimized contents on a well Search optimized website (on-page) "

Agree?

Thxs Richard for pointing out article "5 Key Factors To Rank High On Google" Jeff Bullas's top 2 influencers point to what goes on outside your website. Very interesting.
And thanks Valeriya for laying out the rules so simply.

There are various ways for doing SEO but which are most powerful?? I got the answer now.

1. Title Tag and Meta Tags
2. Link Building and content
3. Social Media

http://www.adrianwhitworth.com/writing-a-successful-blog-post

I've been doing SEO for well over a decade and 90%+ of my clients are on the first page, so please keep that in mind as you read this comment.

While it is mentioned over and over, the idea of "quality content" is often misunderstood and thus glossed over. The extent that the techniques mentioned in this topic improve the quality of the webpages, they help significantly. But those that only attempt to manipulate the results without having an impact on the value of the content, as secondary.

Content includes many of the mentioned variables, such as title, use of descriptive keywords, expansion on the keyword concepts, clarity, proper spelling, good organization and writing, and information valuable to the reader. Good content requires constant attention in a competitive field.

Google's algorithm's purpose is to identify content valuable to their users, because if they don't offer content that the searcher deems appropriate for their search, Google will lose customers to Bing/Yahoo and won't get the PPC revenue they use to pay their PhDs. Regardless of the number of keywords, titles, inbound links, etc., Google's algorithm is excellent at weeding out the posers.

So if you had a choice of spending time optimizing poor content or spending time creating valuable content, the choice should be clear.

Lipstick on a pig is no substitute for lazy writing and poor organization. Pieces that are well written and well organized are usually the most valuable by virtue of the attention to detail.

As far as links in go, keep in mind that word of mouth from people you don't respect is counterproductive. I almost never bother focusing on attempting to get links in, because quality will generate the more valuable links in.

Respect the mathematical ability of the Google engineers to create a "value sensing" equation. If you think you can out maneuver their collective brains with tricks of the trade instead of focusing on providing value, you will succeed to the same extent that producers who can make technically good movies succeed when they start with an inferior script.

the techniques keeps on changing as the trend and ways to Social media keeps on changing very often please visit get an expert help i have taken some suggestion from www.nichesuite.com and they have really given me some really exciting tips on how i can get traffic.. get an expert help.

Top Seo works
1. High page rank social bookmark
2. Forum posting
3. Social Networking Sites
4. Popular Classified Submissions
5. Quality with high page rank directories
http://www.reliance3g.net.in

For me, the best SEO tech. is to DO the basics (which is mentioned above), then you need to concentrate on MARKETING. Believe me Azmi, Results comes from marketing not SEO.