What's the best way to optimize your site for the search engines? Should you be focused on building back links or should you be working on onsite SEO instead? Should you work on making your site more usable to your visitors or reworking it to have a higher keyword density?

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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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You've probably read those sales pitches which promise that you can use search engine optimization to become a millionaire overnight. There are plenty of unscrupulous SEO experts and of course, con artists out there who are on the lookout for a quick buck from people who are, well, on the lookout for a quick buck. These people tell you that if you adopt their less-than-ethical strategies, great riches can be yours in no time.

Of course, these come-ons are more hype than substance and even supposing for a moment that you really could make a lot of money in the short term by flouting SEO best practices, would you rather make money right now or have a business which is sustainable and continues to grow and generate revenue year after year? Hopefully the latter - because if you're going for the quick cash-in, you'll only be left disappointed, with nothing to show for the work you've done.

So how do ethics and SEO tie in? Let's start by looking at white hat (ethical) vs. black hat (questionable/unethical) SEO.

Black hat SEO involves trying to get a high ranking in the search engines in ways which violate the letter or the spirit of ethical SEO practices. Some examples of black hat SEO include:

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One thing any successful online business owner will gladly tell you is that you shouldn't go with the first SEO consultant or firm that tells you that they can get your site into the #1 spot in the Google search results. For that matter, you shouldn't hire anyone who makes these kinds of promises - SEO just doesn't work that way.

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Meta tags aren't useless, but spending too much time thinking about them most certainly is. There are some people who insist on cramming meta tags full of your keywords (and even throwing in irrelevant keywords for good measure). Others will tell you that you need to be aware of your Google PageRank and that a good PR is the key to success.
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If you've spent any time on SEO or internet business forums, you've probably seen people talking about the pros and cons of submitting your site to search engines. If you're new to inline business, you may not even know what it's all about. Submitting your site to a search engine is a simple process; you visit the website of the search engine and give them your site's URL and your most relevant keywords.

For help in this area, check out Andrea's website SEO services.

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If you're building a new site or fine tuning an old one, there are a lot of things to think about. You might be occupied with things like a logo, color schemes, finding a web designer, a developer or a writer to create content for your site, among other things. Each of the people you work with will have their own ideas about what's best for your site. For example, designers will tell you that your graphics and color scheme are the most important thing. A developer will tell you that the site needs to be have a solid code base under the hood. The writer will say that it's content and content alone that matters.

Tip: If you would like some help, Andrea offers website SEO services.

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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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