magine for a moment you are the advertising executive for a large automobile company. Your company has just released the most economical car ever and your job is to make sure everyone knows about it.

Which of the following would you do?

1. Place a full page ad in one or two car magazines, then spend the next year rehashing and tweaking the wording of that ad, because it wasn't creating the salës you wanted.

OR

2. Advertise in every magazine and newspaper you can find, start national TV advertising campaigns, make sure you have slots on every commercial radio station in the country, advertise on billboards, in cinemas, sponsor sporting events and what ever else you could think of.

It doesn't take a genius to work out the second idea is a much better plan. This may come as a shock to you, but the major search engines are not the only source of visitors to your website. Many SEO gurus are quick to point out to you that search engines are the only way to achieve substantial traffïc. That is simply not true. One disturbing idea promoted heavily by the SEO world recently is that "Links are dead". My answer to that idea is, if links were dead then there would be no web.

Links are how people travel the web, whether they are text links, banners or email links. To visit any site you need to clïck a link. Google itself is one enormous searchable link database.

Let's states something even more obvious. Google is not the only site on the web that links to other sites. There are directories, there are banner exchanges, and the big one there are hundreds of millïons of other websites. How many of those carry a link to your site?

For any keyword or phrase on the major search engines there are millïons of sites vying for just 10 first page places. Are you really devoting all your promotion time to SEO with those kinds of odds?

There is also much talk of the value of links, and nearly all of it is based on the value of links in a search engine's eyes, and how that will or will not improve your rankings. Stop!!! You need to get this!!! The value of a link is how many times it gets used, clicks and visits, NOT rankings.

While many will object to this statement, SEO is nothing more than educated guesswork. Why do I say that? Simple, because Google, Yahoo and MSN do NOT tell SEO experts how they order their results. Just the opposite, they regularly change how their results are ordered to stay one step ahead of the SEO experts. Why do they do that? Because they do not want their results manipulated, period! They want one thing, to deliver accurate search results.

Don't take my word for this, go and get the words from the horse's mouth here.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Have you?:

- Listed your site in a couple of hundred directories?

- Exchanged quality visible links with at least 200 sites?

- Exchanged banners with sites in your genre?

- Started a small pay-per-click advertising campaign?

- Written articles to do with the genre of your site and offered them to other sites for frëe inclusion in their newsletter or on their site?

- Had your site reviewed by a review site?

- Donated a product or frëe membershïp to a competition on another site?

These are only a few promotion methods that will bring visitors to your site. There are many many more, if you use your imagination. This is also advertising that will not be undone in one minute by a Google algorithm change.

Am I saying don't optimize your site? NO, I am saying don't rely totally on SEO for your traffïc.