SEO is dead

I am relatively new to SEO, Google rankings, page indexing and everything else that comes part and parcel of having and maintaining a website. I have had to learn everything as I go, from the very beginning not knowing how to even get a website up and running and where to buy a domain name from(let alone making the domain names WHOIS info private which I didn't find out until many months in!), to now having to find backlinks and figuring out percentages to optimise keywords.

Working in The World Wide Web is a contradiction, its the fullest and busiest yet also loneliest place to work. In the SEO world especially, there is no support  it's dog eat dog and everyone is against everyone else... unless you pay them!
It doesn't matter that your website has nothing to do with theirs and there is no competition or threat, they will still not help you out.

As a beginner, I needed help!
Source: www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org

As a beginner, I turned mostly to forums and YouTube videos to help me out and as places to learn from, YouTube videos were generally rubbish and self promoting, but surely I could find some helpful, knowledgeable people on the forums, these were SEO forums after-all.  So off I naively went and asked all sorts of newbie questions, an at first it was fine, I got a few answers (some spam but a few good ones). My main response from people regarding how to climb up the rankings was 'get more backlinks', but how? 'forum posting and use your signature as a link, it's totally white hat'.  Ok, why not, I'll give it a go. Most forums you have to have made a certain number of posts before getting a signature, so I followed the rules, made legitimate posts and joined in legitimate conversations  even helping people out with my new found knowledge  Finally I got to the required number of posts, put in my signature with a little link, and BAM, my posts got deleted. Everytime I tried to post a newpost, a genuine one, it was deleted! This happened on a few forums. So it was time to try another way  of getting backlinks

I'd heard of blog commenting. Again, I didn't want to be spammy, just wanted to get my site out there, so I looked for blogs that related to my niche, they were blogs about apps, and smartphone games. Most of them I found really interesting and I made sure every blog comment something I would write even if I weren't trying to promote my site. Almost every blog comment I wrote was taken down.

I was losing hope with my backlinking strategy,  I turned to social bookmarking but even Reddit wasn't letting me add my link (just one sodding link! and i'd commented and contributed plenty to the sites other news!), and Wiki answers decided to ban my site after only putting it in the 'relevant links' section once, and the question was where can I get the Logos Quiz answers? Literally my site is the answer!
I even wrote a couple of high quality articles to submit as a guest blogger (and yes they were high quality!), but got rejected by all except 2.  I was losing my mind! What was I supposed to do?!? How was I supposed to do SEO?

I know what you're thinking, sounds like a spammer, serves her right, she deserved it. But I can assure you I am not in the least bit a spammer, I have seen spam and I do not promote my site that, I think it devalues the site immensely and after the hard work I have put in, why would I want to devalue it.
How are you supposed to do SEO or even just market and promote your site so that people know it's there if at every turn you get shot down? How do people get their sites to number 1 in Google?

Is Blackhat SEO the only way to go now?
Source: www.qafila.wordpress.com

I have finally, after many many months of looking figured it out, Adwords, and Blackhat. Simply put that is all that's left, SEO is dead now, its almost as impossible to implement as knowing what Google's next ridiculous algorithm update is going to be. For your site to be seen nowadays, you must pay either Google (Adwords) or if you're not savvy enough to do-it-yourself then you need to pay a hacker or other blackhat seo specialist to put you on their link wheel or add you to their blogging network. FYI, I have gone with the first option, I have turned to Adwords, which in my opinion stinks! I paid £12.90 for 23 clicks! But I feel it's better than going the blackhat way because surely, SURELY, this will soon get sorted out by Google? Right? Google? Please?

Now you may be wondering, as I have spoken so much about it what my site actually is and maybe you want to look at it to see what I'm talking about. Well I'm not putting a link in this post, I know, completely ridiculous, as a link would be very relevant  however that would be bad SEO. You see I've mentioned my site and put a link to it many times before in this blog and so putting another one in would look suspicious to Google and potentially bring my site down. Just another example of how very stupid these algorithms have become.