What do you really want from your SEO?

We are not here to debate whether or not your site should have inbound links, I believe we have made that pretty clear by now. If you want to have any chance of existing on internet, you must have a load of quality inbound links.

Those inbound links will generate good search engine ranking position for you as well as bringing you a lot of traffic.

The debate today revolves around the main purpose of the inbound link you create and which type should be given more value:

• Inbound links that will increase your ranking position.

• Inbound links that will increase your traffic volume.

Of course, there are always the few lucky ones who always can manage to have a golden inbound link, the one that does both, that is increase your link juice and generate traffic for you; but for most of the cases, it doesn't work that way.

Inbound links that will increase your ranking position:

We are talking here about all those links that carry a lot of "link juice" and will help you increase your PR. A higher PR will increase the authority of your page/site and ultimately gives you a shot to a better ranking.

With a good PR site, it's fairly easy to find partners for link exchange and other stuff like that. Once you have a high search engine ranking position, it's also very easy for you to attract traffic through the organic search results.

On the downside however:

• It takes time to create a good search engine ranking position for a good keyword. In average a good SEO strategy usually takes about 1 year in consideration.

• People are not keen to link to a new site without PR at first. The "green bar" is updated every 3 months or so in average. Assuming you are doing your work right, it would take at least that much time before your PR shifts from blank to slightly green... and another 3 to 6 months minimum before it gets a respectable PR.

• The links that carries link juice usually are quite poor to bring traffic to your site by themselves (exception for the golden links).

This kind of links is mostly the kind you get from doing some sort of link exchange with other websites. Those are links that are on pages (preferably with a good PR) indexed by the search engines and not affected by a rel="nofollow" attribute.

Inbound links that will increase your traffic volume:

Those are links towards your website where their main purpose is not so much to increase your PR than to draw traffic towards your site. A good example of this kind of links are the ones from article marketing, forum posting and blog commenting.

The reason is that most of those places have either a rel="nofollow" attribute (in most of the cases for blogs), either not so much link juice value (forum signature don't carry SEO weight when it comes to link juice from recent test), either the page is listed in the supplementary results, which is the case for article marketing in most of the cases.

So why bother with those activities?

Yes, those links don't carry PR value, but they do carry another priceless resource for you:

Targeted Traffic.

That's right, those links are "gateways" to more information on your site, and even if search engines don't really give them value, they do bring you a lot of targeted traffic quickly.

The downsides for such types of links are clear however:

• No PR value, therefore of very little help to increase your search engine ranking position.

• Requires you to be active constantly for activities such as forum participation and blog commenting. Stopping may lead to an immediate drop in your traffic volume.

• Should you fail to provide really good quality content that would inspire people to follow your link towards your site, you are wasting all your time on those activities.

In conclusion:

Balance is always what will prevail. Using an adequate combination of both types of links will maximize your time and efforts.

Knowing that it will take a couple of months before any of your PR linking become worth anything thing, it may be good to give slightly greater emphasis on your "gateway" links as they may help increase your popularity and generate the traffic that the search engines can't provide you yet.

As your SERP increases as well as your organic traffic volume, you may be interested in reducing slowly your involvement in "gateway" links as they are time consuming and may affect your ROI.

Note that reducing or slow start involvement doesn't mean no involvement! SEO is an ongoing process, it just gets easier and more rewarding over time, that all.

If you have any question, don't hesitate to ask.

I'm here to help.