One of the biggest mistakes that small businesses make in their search engine optimization efforts, is separating link building from promotion in their mind. In essence, link building and promotion are the same thing. You links to your website, from another website, and an effort to drive traffic to your businesses website. Traffic generation is always the ultimate goal for search engine optimization, but many people focus solely on capturing links, instead of capturing links that will help drive traffic on their own as well. This leaves many opportunities on the table, and leaves many search engine optimization experts holding themselves back from huge amounts of traffic that they could be bringing to their website, with relatively the same amount of work.
Traffic Is the Ultimate Goal
Traffic generation is the ultimate goal. Link building allows you to rank highly in the search engines, and thus drives traffic to your website through keyword related searches. Promotion, drives traffic to your website through individuals clicking on your link, and being taken to your website. However, focusing solely on automated styles of link building does not do much in the way of promotion. Those links that you build, likely will only be seen by a handful of people, and clicked on by even fewer. By focusing on building links in areas in which people will see the links, you can drive a large amount of traffic to your websites, without sacrificing the focus on link building for the purpose of search engine optimization. The two are not mutually exclusive, and can be done in conjunction for even larger benefits.
Promotion Is Linkbuilding As
Promotion, in a sense, is link building. In promoting your website, you are linking to your website, from other websites, for the purpose of driving people to your own website. When you post that advertisement on craigslist, whether the link is nofollow or dofollow, you are still creating a link to your website that will be picked up by Google, and potentially help you to rank highly in the search engines. Although promotional links may take additional effort, and more research, ultimately the benefit that you will receive from placing each link will be much higher than placing links at random, wherever the opportunity arises. Commenting on niche related blogs in your industry might be more time-consuming than you would hope, but provide you with high quality links, that can also drive traffic to your website from the readers of those blogs. Not only this, but it creates brand awareness with individuals that are interested in your industry.
Typically, Promotion Sources Are Better Linkbuilding Opportunities
As a general rule of thumb, since promotional links are placed on websites that actually generate traffic, and require a fair bit of effort to get them placed, they are typically much more valuable both in terms of search engine optimization and as a traffic driving resource. You should not separate link building and promotional opportunities in your mind, and instead should try to utilize them together, in conjunction, as a way to improve your search engine rankings as well is drive traffic to your website that is interested in the services that you have to offer.