Deciphering the mysteries of getting search engines to find your site

I am certainly no expert on search engine optimization (SEO), but I know enough to recognize how important it is. Without good SEO, very few people will find your website since most first-time website visits are spawned by major search engines such as Google and Bing. But all of the search engines keep secret the algorithms they use to determine search rank order. That has given birth to a huge industry (racket?) of people selling SEO services. They promise to make your website number one in the listings just by tweaking things like headlines and metatext. Of course, if it were so easy to game the system, why doesn't everybody do it? And then today I ran across this great article that dispells a number of myths associated with this whole SEO thing. It's well worth reading.

All of this begs the question: What do members of SawdustSoup do to bring traffic to their websites? Are you trying to optimize your site for search or just relying on word of mouth and things like social media to bring traffic? What is the point of your website anyway? Are you actually trying to sell there, or is it more of an online portfolio?