Understanding SEO

In my inaugural post, I explained how you only make money if you contribute something useful to society.

How does this principle - about having to contribute to society to make money - apply to SEO?

Many people - the majority, unfortunately - view SEO as a system of tricks and shortcuts to game Google into sending traffic their way. That's blackhat SEO and it doesn't lead to long-term success. In most cases, it doesn't even lead to short-term success. A mistaken belief in trickery is why most people don't make it online.

Real SEO (search engine optimization) is simply enabling search engines to find your content. It means ensuring that search engines can find, identify, crawl, and index your content without too many issues.

Of course, that won't bring you much traffic. But getting traffic isn't the point of SEO. The point of SEO is ensuring that the traffic can come when it wants to come. Think of SEO as establishing your business next to a busy highway, as opposed to in the middle of a deep, dark forest. If your business is next to the highway, traffic can come without hindrances if it wants to.

Getting the traffic to come is called marketing. It's another ballgame.