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SEO is the king in ranking the website in search results with less cost for a long time period. The techniques used in ranking the website should not against the search engine guide lines, if you do not follow the rules your website will be banned.

SEO is only way to rank websites in Google search because that's what search engine optimization is all about. I don't think there are anything other way to rank apart from buy ad space. But search engines are not the only way to receive traffic to your website. There are so many other ways to do it. Probably the biggest way and easiest way to get quality traffic is social media. Cool thing about  using other tragic sources is you don't have to bother about Search engine guidelines anymore. You can use whatever content you want and whatever way to design your sites. Apart from Social Media there plenty of other way to get traffic for your site. Here's 13 other traffic sources which works great,

Traffic Sources For Your Web Site

Each of these traffic sources needs a different approach depending on their nature. For example Yahoo Answers can give you high quality traffic which is great for AdSense and also Amazon. But You need to have a solid long term plan how to use it. Spamming left and right no longer work.

Creating parasite pages is another cool way to do this. You need have to create pages in other sites for small keyword phrases and then use those as doorways to your money site. these semi sites get authority from their mother site  and rank when in search and also you traffic from their mother site. Good example is hubpages, Facebook fan pages etc.