Recently, I stumbled upon a thread of discussion on one of the affiliate marketing forums I like reading. The title of the original post was “SEO is very, very, very easy”. Immediately I thought that it was just someone trying to get a debate stirred up for promoting purposes, but I noticed that people were actually engaging with the post quite strongly.

Some of the replies were utter disbelief, some were in form of a question, and what had hit me was the realization that there were so many people that didn’t know anything (or knew very little) about SEO. 90% of the people engaging with comments and replies were completely off when it comes to knowing the dynamics of this strange and hard to tame animal called Search Engine Optimization.

I read some truly outrageous claims and opinions.

Most of the participants in the debate must have been total newbies, I thought. But, then I saw that many of them had been active forum members for several months, some even for years. 

How the hell could they get it so wrong?

Then I realized that the majority were talking about automated, “set-and-forget” methods and tools that use some aspect of SEO to generate traffic to your website. Most of the people had been indoctrinated by salespeople on the internet and led to believe that there are some magic strategies to generate real traffic to your websites that run on auto-pilot.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a few tools that help you with strategies to generate traffic (and I have been using them for a long time now), and are evergreen, but they don’t work on the premise that they found a way to override Google’s algorithms. 98% of the software solutions and tools out there are just products that do their trick for a while until Google finds out and adjusts the algorithm once again.

The truth is that there is no way on earth that Google (which makes billions of $ on ads) is going to allow anyone to take advantage of a loophole in the algorithm for very long. That would be directly against Google’s financial interests.

The only long-lasting strategies to generate real traffic to your websites are the ones based on originality and quality of content. If your content isn’t 100% unique and you do not deliver quality and value, then Google is not going to reward you with rankings, no matter what hacks you use. 

Take a look at this topic that I cover in detail on my blog, especially article marketing, and on-page SEO as a means to create traffic.

website traffic