SEO is not fraud. But a lot of people who do search engine optimization sure don't know what they're doing.
2. Why isn't SEO fraud?
As a business, you create your promotional message. And then you decide where to run that promotional message. You determine where your right people hang out.
Say you determine that newspapers and radio ads are 2 good mediums for your message. But if you run the same message without any tweaks for the specific mediums, you won't do very well.
Your message has to be relevant for the medium.
If you determine that your business requires a website (or that your business is a website) - and that a lot of your right people will be using the search engines, you need to focus on SEO. You need to learn the tricks of SEO trade. And make your message fit the medium.
3. 5 Minute SEO
Two parts of SEO:
i. Onpage SEO: Search engines look at your web page to determine what it should rank for
- The URL of the page has to be keyword rich
- The title of the page has to be keyword rich
- Use H1 and H2 tags well
- Make sure the entire website is w3c validated
- Use meta description for key pages (especially product pages)
- Create an xml sitemap
ii. Offpage SEO: Search engines look at who is linking to you to determine how highly it should rank you
- Get links from authority websites
- Create good linkworthy content - linkbaiting is actually good
- Get thousands of links from directories (blog / article / rss directories)