Research conducted by MarketingSherpa in their Search Marketing Benchmark Survey of April 2011 identified the following three as the most difficult SEO tactics:

1. External link building
2. Content creation
3. Blogging

These may be the most difficult, but they are also considered the most effective. (At the end of this post I’ll list the top 5 SEO tactics.)

While blogging may be difficult—as much as I support and recommend it myself, don’t I know that firsthand!—it’s an ‘easy’ way to create content in that it requires no special skills (anybody can write) and no special equipment other than your computer and a good word processing or blogging platform.

If your’re a B2B marketer serious about using the internet to promote and grow your business, I would recommend you have and do the following as a minimum requirement:

• A website that includes a blog (or a blog that includes basic website pages like About Us and Contact Us, which is what I have).
• A regular, consistent blogging schedule of at least 2x per week. More frequent, short posts are better than infrequent long posts.
• At least one social media account (like LinkedIn or Twitter) that is maintained and updated regularly. And two of those regular updates should be references and links to your latest blog posting.

You can do what I’m doing, which is to build up content first. This is my personal choice, as I want to be well into the blogging (and other content creation) habit before I begin promoting my posts (and I found sources that say it can take as few as 21 days to as many as 66 days to form a new habit). Also, I want potential followers who are truly interested in what I have to say, and that only can be determined with a little history for them to see. Others may advise differently, and if rapid SEO is your goal, I would say start blogging and promoting at the same time, as soon as you can.

As promised, following are the five top SEO tactics per the survey:

1. Content creation
2. Keyword / Key phrase research
3. Title tags
4. SEO landing pages
5. External link building

And this link to MarketingSherpa will show you more SEO survey information and a few content creation tips to boot.