The title of this article says it all. Real SEO to your website takes actual work and there is no shortcuts to hard work. If you want to have a successful website you are going to have to make a commitment to hard work, dedication to offering your visitors something of value, and above all you must be creative.

Since the first days of the Internet people have tried various blackhat, or extreme grey hat technical. In the short term they have some good results, but long term they spend too much time trying to game the SE’s and not enough time providing a quality product that will make them a success.

Randy Ray recently posted another great articles on his SEO Blog about Wasting Time getting Crappy links when you could be spending your time getting quality natural links with good content. This is a hard concept to swallow for lazy webmasters because writing good content is work. while finding spammy social network links is much easier in the short term.

I’ve seen a lot of talk on various forum recently about leveraging social network sites and RSS Directories to get easy do-follow linkbacks to your website. While on the surface this seems like a great SEO strategy, as I said above, there is NO shortcuts in SEO. You may get a temporary bump in rankings from a bunch of Spammy RSS links or Social networking links, but long term your time is much better spent analyzing your website, keywords, title tags, and targeted market to improve your website.

Organic links are more powerful than paid links or spammy low quality links. Here is something to remember: If anyone can get a link from website X = then the value of the link is diminished. If you can get a link organically from a website that doesn’t link out much = It will be 10x more powerful than 10 links from some RSS directory or article submission site.

So, do yourself and your visitors a favor and concentrate on putting high quality focused content on your website. A year from now you will be thanking yourself for putting in the work.