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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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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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.