LifeinAsia - 7:26 pm on Jun 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

One follows the other.

Not always- high rankings do not necessarily mean more traffic, although often do. (You can rank #1 in all the search engines, but if most people know your site is utter crap, they're probably going to start clicking from the #2 results.) But again, is more traffic really the end result you want to achieve? What are you going to do with that traffic? Are you going to monetize it? If so, depending on how you monetize it, all traffic is not necessarily alike.

By the way, I'm asking this primarily out of amused curiosity. I have done very little link building on my own for my own sites. Other than some manual link submissions and a few personal requests from many years ago, I have done nothing to ask anyone for links for a very long time.

But I have seen such a frenzy about getting links, most of the time with no apparent goal or game plan- just a focus on getting links without any idea of what, if any, benefit will result from their work.

Before jumping into the lemming parade, I've been trying to analyze the entire process, look at the results I want to achieve, and see if the work put into it is going to achieve positive results, or if the time/effort spent doing that would be better spent doing something else with better returns. So I'm just trying to see what other ways people are looking at their link-building projects, see what their different goals are, and see how they are measuring their success rates for achieving those goals.

For example, for an e-commerce site, most likely the desired results would be more profit. This would come from either more sales or sales of higher ticket items. Looky-loos from Google may or may not help reach the goal, so rather than focus on trying to improve my rankings, a better usage of my time would be to get links from sites frequented by people interested in buying my widgets. Should beat my head against the wall begging and pleading for 3 months before I finally get a link on the most heavily trafficed site for widget lovers (including the research time spent to identify the top sites for widget lovers), or should I do things the easy way and just pay for advertising on the site? And if pay, what rate is going to give me a positive ROI?

If I have a site that just has content with a lot of AdSense advertising, my goals and methods are going to be different.