- Mar 21, 2013
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However, in theory you can't just "make up" keywords. They are a finite amount if the search string is of a finite length and the alphabet is of a finite amount of symbols/letters.
I will give you an example.
Let's say the whole English alphabet consists only the letter "a" and "b" and the search string can be a maximum of two letters. Then ALL the combinations are a,b, aa, bb, ab and ba. Doesn't matter if you consider "ba" a meaningful keyword and "ab" a new not-meaningful keyword. They both still exist. This example is just in a much smaller scale.
The whole point of this discussion is that SEO is not zero sum. It's in constant growth. Every single update there's a ton of new sites and competitors getting in the game and overall WWW traffic is growing, not steady. It's not just shuffling traffic among existing sites.
Check this table: https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
Every 6 months hundreds of thousands of new users join the Internet.
This, in itself, proves it's not zero sum. The number of users is growing monthly, daily, hourly.
If you do some research you'll find out that the nr of keywords searched for is growing as well.
Absolutely nothing is zero sum in SEO. That's the point.