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November 27, 2005

What comes first, the traffic or the links?

Much is made of the importance of getting links from the "authoritative" sites in your niche. Certainly getting the top-ranked sites for your chosen keywords to link to your site plays a huge role in getting your site to the top of the search engines, but the benefit really extends beyond the value of the link itself.

If you have a site about SEO, and Danny Sullivan or some other industry luminary links to your site from one of their blog posts or articles, a lot of people who're interested in search are going to be sent your way. A few of them are probably also going to link to you, and, in turn, some of their readers are going to be sent your way, which could results in a few more links, and so on.

Many of these people would likely never have found your site if the original high-profile site had never linked to it. This is particularly true if your site was not well known up to that point.

As Aaron Wall pointed out recently (commenting on an excellent post by randfish),

Sometimes the best part of a good link is the onslaught of secondary links that follow.

What's the point of optimizing a page for the search engines? Ostensibly, it's about getting more traffic to the page. Preferably targeted traffic, but if your profit model is primary contextual advertising (as is the case with most blogs) then just about any traffic will do, as long as there's lots of it.

Lots of traffic often results in more people linking to you, which helps improve search rank, which in turn can generate more traffic, and so on, in a continual cycle of improvement.

Of course, it doesn't always work like that. Sometimes getting linked to by a popular site sends very little traffic. Sometimes tons of people come to your site but no one links to you. But when it does work, it can be probably the best, most natural-looking way to build links there is.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the point of this post: Is link building even necessary if you've got traffic? The question is a meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I've built a lot of links (a few to this blog, even) simply by writing an article or post and using PPC to send lots of traffic to it. The links followed naturally.

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