[zpeti]

There are no specific stats in this article about what exactly we mean by SEO and traffic. What do you want to do with 1m visitors per month? Make money from them or sit back happy that people read your content? Run a business, or a blog? What is the end goal here, have a well read blog with no specific niche/topic? In that case SEO probably can be organic.

But if you are a business dependent on some google traffic for your business, and your competitors are optimising for keywords and building links, you are probably going to have a super hard time winning. It's not impossible, but you have to a magnificent job just concentrating on content to beat out your competition.

[generalpass]

Not to mention that the content of the blog is developer focused.

How would his techniques perform if he were writing about consumer goods such as quadcopters or coffee makers?

[dazc]

Not sure about consumer goods such as coffee makers but a lot of small businesses try blogging as an seo tactic and give up very quickly when they don't see instant results.

Aside from this, lack of focus and an unwillingness to give away free advice are another two common mistakes.

[CM30]

This is a really good point, and one I feel a lot of SEO articles and sites seem to ignore. The niche you're in makes a huge difference in how easy it is to market your work.

As you say, developer focused content is easy to market online. There are tons of blogs and news sites willing to let you write guest articles or link to your work, people tend to share articles about the topic on a regular basis and sites like this one provide a perfect place to share the content too.

Same goes with the gaming and general tech fields too. They're all very easy to build links in, and provide plenty of free traffic opportunities in general.

Many niches aren't like this. They don't have the same number of enthusiast forums and subreddits, people are less likely to share content about them, and the news sites focused on them are either money focused or not interested in giving you a shot at all.

Then there's stuff like gambling, adult content etc, where no one in their right mind will ever link to your site, and where even the ad networks will tell you to get lost. Good luck marketing those without blackhat SEO, or some other way to game the system.