1. Who gains "initial traction" from SEO, anyways? A fresh website to Google is not indexed for an arbitrary amount of time up to many months. Word of mouth and media coverage are what give startups their momentum. Search engine ranking is more of a longterm byproduct in practice.
2. Increasing search engine ranking isn't hard. You can overpower seemingly entrenched websites with a mild link-generation campaign.
3. SEO is all about inbound links and not much else. Aside from blogspam, I haven't seen a website that seemed to compromise usability for on-page "search engine optimization", the latter being so severely deprecated that it's only peddled by people who have the word "SEO" self-proclaimed in their job title.
2. Increasing search engine ranking isn't hard. You can overpower seemingly entrenched websites with a mild link-generation campaign.
3. SEO is all about inbound links and not much else. Aside from blogspam, I haven't seen a website that seemed to compromise usability for on-page "search engine optimization", the latter being so severely deprecated that it's only peddled by people who have the word "SEO" self-proclaimed in their job title.