Well know, seo doesn't do that but seo has nothing to do with keyword stuffing. It is really a science and very complicated and there are many, many, many factors that can help a site rank.

By doing good seo, you are putting in the work. Not doing it is the easy way and usually not the most successful way. :)

When I wanted to learn why SEO was important I jumped on YouTube and watched the Google webmasters videos where they explain the algorithm and what goes into it. They won't tell you how things are weighted but they will tell you the factors and all of the things they no longer give any weight. As it turns out they ignore a lot of things now because of abuse. More or less what they tell you is to try to get as much information as possible in the first 200 characters of a URL because that is what Google uses if there is no meta description for the URL. It kind of makes sense since if there's nothing interesting in the first paragraph people probably won't read the rest of it.

Having said that there are topics so oversaturated that new sites will never crack the top of the search engine rankings.