This past week I've talked to three very nice people about search engine optimization (SEO).  Interestingly all 3 people are first-time affiliates and all 3 sites are about credit cards. 

It turns out all 3 people bought these sites from the same company.  Except for different domain names and hero shot, all the sites are exactly the same.  Here was the sales pitch: buy a website for products people want, get it ranked in the search engines and get rich quick.

After paying their hard earned money for the site, the website hosting fee and domain registration, these nice people started down their path of contacting search engine optimization agencies like WebMetro.

I then proceeded to tell these people the truth. The truth is that getting a website well ranked for a keyword like "credit cards" will take a very long time to become well ranked.  With 139 million competing pages in Google alone, it will take easily 18 months of very aggressive on-page and off-page optimization overtake the top ranked sites.

Aggressive means rewriting all the existing product content to remove the duplicate content issue.  Once that is complete adding pages and pages of keyword rich text content.  Adding a blog to continually add fresh content to the site and encourage reindexing.  Aggressive means securing links from blogs, paid directories like Yahoo, non-paid directories, press releases, articles, newsletters, etc. 

After considering the content rewriting, the content addition, blog implementation, and hours and hours of link development, I explained this will be a very expensive SEO campaign and provided quotes.  In each conversation I heard silence.  They all realized they had been sold a swampland in Florida.

Search engine optimization is about getting rich slowly -like the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare story.

Anything else is just a fable.