"I once had a farm in Africa" Meryl Streep told us in Out of Africa.

Well Meryl, I had a house in Africa too, and it was a nice sturdy house with an enormous patio that overlooked a landscape filled with trees of such shape that my eyes never became familiar with, and which never failed to be lovely to the point of amazing me every morning I woke up. Beyond the trees the land sloped slowly until it reached the sea.

 What does that have to do with SEO? As the banana trees in that yard would tell you, bunches.

I lived in Africa because I worked in logistics for humanitarian aid organizations. Logistics is basically the art of solving problems. In New York City, you can remove a container off of a truck by backing a truck into a truck ramp and easily remove whatever you need to get off the truck with forklifts.

In Africa, by contrast, the way you get a container off a truck was to tie one end of a chain to the container, and tie the other end of the chain to a big tree. (Displayed in true "crappy drawing" seomoz style below).

Then you tell the driver to floor it and drive away from the tree. In most cases, this results in the removal of the container from the truck...

Problem solved.  The container is off the truck. Logistics rock!

But we are not trying to get a container off a truck, we are trying to make money from our websites. If I apply my common sense, sorta simple solution, logistical brain to this problem, I see something very clearly.

You need to have traffic.

I want to say that again.

You need to have traffic.

You need traffic to your website to make money. You say you understand this--you may even feel that I have made two crappy drawings in vain because you already know you need traffic to make money.

But you are wrong, you do not understand this. If you understood this, you would have no ads on your site. You would have no affiliate links on your site. If you understood this, you would have valuable information on your site.

You need traffic, and you will not earn traffic by slapping people with fish the moment they arrive on your site. (Smacking people with fish = mucho ads on your website, as poorly illustrated below.)

How to know if you are committed to earning traffic

If you are actively noting everything you like about the websites that you visit and are replicating that experience on your own website, you are committed to earning traffic.

If you are actively noted everything you hate about the websites that you visit and are ensuring that nothing on your website is similar to the things that irk you about other websites, you are committed to earning traffic.

Traffic is the chain

If the internet were a tree and your website were a truck, traffic would be the chain (the money is the container on the truck).

Are you seeking traffic or money? You need traffic to get money. Are you actively improving your site, or are you constantly driving away from trees wondering why the money isn't coming off?