Jill Whalen quotes:

Good SEO work only gets better over time. It's only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.

Even the best SEOs are not magicians. They can't simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you'd see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.

As with anything you set out to learn in life, you don't get from point A to point Z without touching upon all those letters in between.