As we’ve just discussed, many link building efforts in the SEO world are done to improve a site’s search engine rankings: Links as votes, as trust, as rank-building influencers, etc.

Gaining Direct Traffic:

Oddly enough, search engine spiders aren’t the only ones that see links to your site. Web users visiting sites can and (hopefully) do click on those links, generating direct traffic to you. Once again though, it’s worth your while to focus on quality links from relevant pages. How often have you actually clicked on a link you found on an extremely spammy, worthless page? If the original page is garbage, you assume anything it links to is probably garbage as well.

It should come as no shock that humans passively analyze page quality when assessing link value. After all, the search engines ultimately try to algorithmically reproduce the results a human would provide if they had the time to editorially rate every single page in existence.

As such, you will get higher volume and better quality direct traffic from pages that are not only popular and highly trafficked themselves, but relevant to your content.

Visibility, Branding & Influence:

What happens when every time someone looks around online for information about boats, tours or Seattle they see not only links to your site, but comments about you in every prominent blog on the subject? You become an authority in the field. By participating in the community around your niche and building content worthy of links and discussion within said community, you gain visibility, branding and influence.

How you want your image to manifest though is entirely up to you. This is just one more example where quantity may be easy to come by, but quality is what really counts. Do you want to have visibility as that guy who always has useful information, the one everybody should check out if they’re interested in Seattle boat tours? Or do you want to be the Weekly World News of your niche, always complaining of a Loch Ness-like monster in Puget Sound?

As people within (and even outside of) your community begin to recognize and respect your image and your brand, they will reference you and link to you as a resource. Links bring traffic, links bring search results, links bring passion…make your users passionate about your site.