I get your point.
You have just to realize that certain things are worth so much money that can be worth the time.
PPC seems more of the shorterm thing. It works like charm, been doing it for years and still do.
But Look at this,
My keyword gets 30000 searches daily(all seach engines taken together) with PPC I get 600 clicks a day.
The rest goes to top 2 SEO results.
Outranking Wikipedia or Godaddy for a generic, top tier key-phrase like Domain Names or Web Hosting means
1) You know php, htaccess, regex, mysql, xrumer and prstorm like a priest knows the Gospel;
2) your girlfriend is having fun with the guy next door while you stay days without sleeping;
3) your competitors will report you twice per day to Google for paid links they placed to frame you (the rest of the day they try hard to discover your links with siteexplorer);
4) paid scrapers will try to spamdex your own content after stealing it, to make you rank down (it is a business);
5) An heroic Indian manual reviewer from Goooogle (eg, 74.125.16.2) will come to visit you whenever he has some free time, just to blacklist someone who MUST have done something blackhat, because you don't pay for Adsense and aren't a big corp...so in doubt let's ban
6) with the resouces you needed for these generic terms you could have ranked first for cool (comparatively) low competition long tail keyword niches like
cheap vps canada
forex vps
web hosting australia
cms ready hosting
unlimited bandwidth hosting
or whatever saleable stuff Wikipedia can't cover if not in a spammy article.
7) you are the greatest benefactor of hard working Indians well trained to spam social networks and social bookmarks
8) You will be having a heart attack anytime Gooooooogle introduces a new Caffeine-like update, and you will rush checking your own rank to see if it is affected, maybe without knowing that now the fat G is personalizing the search for all losers of the universe by default. Every loser gets his unique tailor made serp page... SEO is always less a constant and general achievement.
Let's also remember that...
9) The searches showed aren't reflecting the amount of people searching. If you make 100 searches for your term and nobody else searches it, it will still show 100 searches performed for it next month.
10) There is also a radical difference between people who search and people who buy. People who buy are usually rare animals with a long tail...
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If you are sitll convinced (as I've been) go for it;p