This is not 2001. On-page optimization does not work that well anymore. I know how to rank pages but the problem is it is too expensive and time consuming to be worthwhile. You need a lot of quality links and high domain name authority.
High DA and quality links are a necessity, but I have people in my network who make 100k profit per month with a lot of sites that have DA17-25 (pretty weak) and some backlinks (around 30 per site, although there are some strong ones). They usually analyze the content of their competitors and write articles that are simply +500 words longer. You wouldn't believe what's still possible today, although I agree that it doesn't work for main keywords.
It's cumbersome (analyzing niches, competitors, finding long tail keywords, organizing content writers), but it still works.
Disclaimer: I don't sell online courses or something. I know that I may sound like a fraud, but it's simply a network of the best SEO people in Germany. I only know 4-5 people who earn this amount of money passively, so they're the 0.0001%
That sounds like a full time job of finding, editing and optimizing niche content. I'd consider that a fair job.
It's very far from the practice a long time ago of creating hundreds of domains linking to each other to get the top page, filled with placeholders and tags.
