Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
Chevy Powell: Whats the most critical aspect of SEO ;
Peter Lunn: Hi Chevy, it will be interesting to read what others say, but I would say having high quality unique content written for the 'customer' of that content (in the widest sense of the word 'customer'). I think that is the hub of SEO. Everything you do with SEO will have content at its centre and the success of your SEO efforts will depend to a large part on the quality of that content. Peter
Scott Rozier: Lets assume we have good content how do we best optimize to get people to our content?
Matt Staton: Realizing there isn't one thing but many things that take time and effort. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
Joseph Paulino: After you've established good content, I think off-page optimization would be the direction to take.
Scott Rozier: If your market is local then local links make a big difference ar at least seem to
Tony McCreath: Search engines can crawl, index and show your pages in their search results.
Peter Lunn: +Scott Rozier ;I agree that local links make a big difference especially through a Google+ Local listing.
I think the best emerging opportunity for getting people to content is through Google+. With the channel growing all the time and it being the most interactive, it has the opportunity to be the best online networking channel where you can publish snippets of your content (particularly blog content) and engage with people in conversation. ;
But as +Matt Staton says, like SEO and like face-to-face networking, it's a long game that over time will produce results. There is growing evidence too that engagement on Google+ has a knock on effect to ranking in Google SERPs
Search Lab Marketing: In my experience, knowing your target audience is the most important aspect of SEO. ;Too many folks focus on ranking for popular terms that doesn’t necessarily resonate with their target audience. ;The result is a lot of website traffic with minimal conversions, not to mention all the money and time poured into building those rankings. ;
Once you’ve gotten to really know your audience design everything for them, the rest (rankings, traffic, conversions, shares, etc.) will follow naturally.
Peter Lunn: I totally agree with +Search Lab Marketing ;and this really comes before creating high quality unique content for your site and anything else you do.
f you understand who your 'customer' is and understand the questions they are asking and information they are looking for, then everything you do resulting from that with that in mind will, as SLM says, follow naturally.
Johnny Base: +Chevy Powell ;I've made a cheat sheet for a client. I think on-page optimization is still very important based on my recent work. as well as meta data and optimized url's. Even though the trending discussions seem to dismissed these subjects as old SEO. ;Basic on-page-optimization every page has only 1 <h1> ; one outbound link to a high authority site like wikipedia, make each page or post 300-1500 words, detailed specific. Each page has a purpose. I keep my keyword density below 1%. Every page still has keywords - hush hush ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; Title – first heading must be done in Heading 1 Title length between 50-70 characters Description length 156 characters max ; Every page a purpose ;
Whats the most critical aspect of SEO ? 
