Follow only your SEO expert’s advice, and you’ll spend all your time researching keyword phrases and looking for possible backlinks. Follow your web designer and you’ll be immersed in building the right image for your site. Ignore everyone but your programmer and your site’s code will be a thing of beauty. But no one will ever see it.

While each of these experts have a point  -- after all, your site must be optimized for search engines, have a professional image and be coded properly – they’re all missing one key element in the equation: Content.

Why is content so important?

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You've heard plenty about search engine optimization and other methods for bringing in more customers to your website. In all of the excitement over SEO, many people lose sight of the most important thing of all: their customers. If you're not making a positive user experience a priority, then you can implement all the SEO techniques in the world and still fail to attract a loyal customer base.

How can you tell if you've lost sight of your customers' needs? These are all indicators that you're paying too much attention to search engine optimization and not enough to your customers:
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While blogs are an established marketing tool on their own, they are valuable for more than just direct publicity. Blogging is not exactly a well-paid publication platform, and while it is possible to create an income from a blog, it is sometimes not the primary goal for an online marketer. The real payoff of a blog comes with the SEO potential that it can create. Whether on-site or off, a moderately popular blog can quickly become your greatest SEO resource.

So before you invest in hundreds of off-site articles for your SEO campaign, take a look at the potential impact 100 on-site blog posts could have. Controlling your own content is always valuable, especially when it can lead to potential sales and clients. Put your creativity to good use with these five methods for turning blog content into a powerful SEO currency.

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There's a lot of Search Engine Optimization information out there and much of it is conflicting. Even if you consider yourself relatively knowledgeable, it can still be frustrating looking for effective SEO techniques; which is why so many people fall for those spam email messages from SEO companies promising to get you to the top of the search engine results instantly.

Don't be one of these people. These firms are almost always trying to scam you; if they get you any results at all, they'll be extremely short lived. They use unethical methods which can get your site banned from the search engines - meaning that no one will be able to find your site.

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SEO can be easy or hard - it's your choice, really; here, we'll focus on doing things the easy way. Search engine optimization is a term which covers various strategies for making your website more visible in the search engines and maintaining this visibility.

There are paid methods of search engine optimization like Google AdWords and other pay per click advertisements, but what we're going to talk about here are free SEO methods to drive traffic to your site through the search engines.

To make things very simple, there are two things which you need to focus on here: you need to make sure that your website tells the search engines exactly what its content is about and try to get other people spreading the word about your website to the search engines.

Getting your site noticed by the search engines and making sure that they know what your site is about is done through on-site SEO. This includes filling your website with high quality content which is relevant to the topic of your site and including headings, subtitles and image alt tags which use words which make it easy for Google and other search engines to determine what the topic of your site happens to be. There's obviously a lot more to it than just this, but this is a good start towards letting Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines understand what your site is all about. If you don't make it clear through your content and other onsite factors, the search engines won't be able to tell and people will have a difficult time finding your site through search queries.

Getting other sites to spread the word about your site consists of what is known as offsite SEO. This largely has to do with building links to your site from other sites; this is by far the most important part of offsite SEO, so this is where you should dedicate the majority of your energy. If it can get you links, it should be a priority for you.

Some examples of link building strategies include writing articles and submitting them to directories, commenting on other people's blogs, contributing to blogs as a guest writer, building and maintaining a Squidoo lens or other secondary website, using Facebook and Twitter, writing and submitting press releases, creating online videos, using social bookmarking services like Digg and Stumble Upon, leaving comments on forums and anything and everything else that can help create more links to your site from relevant sites.

You could easily write an entire book on building backlinks alone, but since we're just going over some of the basics here, you'll have to keep reading to learn more about link building and other traffic generating SEO strategies.