What is the first thing to SEO??

IMHO people spend far too much time worrying about SEO and not nearly enough time making good content.

Content is king. SEO is an attempt to compensate for not having sufficiently good content.

I have several websites that are very highly ranked in Google and other search engines. None of them have ever had even 1 minute of time invested in SEO on them. The reason they do well is that the content is valuable and people want to read it.

If you want your site to succeed, step back from worrying about search engines and ask yourself a few questions. Is the site valuable to readers? Who would want to read it? How can you make it more worth someone reading?

Focus on that first, not gaming the system.

My tuppence.