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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Domain names are cheap. There are a lot of people who have dozens of domain names lying around, since they've become so affordable and so readily available. It's also easy to throw up a simple webpage or a WordPress-based site for your new domain. However, is setting up multiple domain names a good idea in terms of SEO?

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When You Should Use a New Domain or Sub-Domain

There are situations where setting up a new domain or sub-domain makes sense. For example, if your site sells one product and you've set up an affiliate program to market this product, then it may be a good idea to set up a separate domain or sub-domain which contains nothing but this product and a link to make a purchase.

Alternately, if your website includes information on a variety of different topics which are unrelated, then it makes sense to create a different website with a different domain name for each topic.

If you've got a site with a great deal of content in multiple categories which you'd like to keep separate yet all under the same brand umbrella, then sub-domains may be the way to go. For example, look at About.com for an idea about how this can be done.

When You Shouldn't Use Multiple Domains or Sub-Domains

Before you go ahead and start creating multiple sites or sub-domains, think about how these new sites or sub-sites affect the user experience of your site. Make sure that your sites are still easy to navigate before you go live with your new pages.

Most importantly, ask yourself why you need multiple domains or sub-domains before you create anything. If the idea is to dominate search engine results by having multiple sites, think again. The search engines don't like to see multiple sites which have more or less the same content; they see it as an attempt to trick them and they typically don't take kindly to this approach. If you're throwing up dozens of sites with the same content, differing only in their domain names, you can expect your search engine rankings to stagnate (or even decline); some search engines consider this kind of thing a form of spamming and may even ban your site from their results entirely.

There is another angle to consider here: unless you have a lot of people on your team to write content for your many websites, there's no way that one person has enough time in the day to keep your sites updated with fresh content. It's a better idea to put all of your content which is on the same topic or at least is aimed at the same demographic on a single page or sub-domain. Making a new site or new sub-domain isn't always the answer, so think very carefully before you begin building on to your existing site - it's often better to simply develop what you already have.

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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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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