Allow me now to state obvious, success of any website is in direct proportion to amount of visitors it receives. If success is about visitors then why on earth would any intelligent business person devote 95% of their promotion time and budget to a single method of advertising their site?

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

Which of following would you do?

1. Place a full page ad in one or two car magazines, then spend next year rehashing and tweaking wording of that ad, because it wasn't creating sales 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 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 second idea is a much better plan. Now this may come as a shock to you, but major search engines are not only source of visitors to your website. Many SEO gurus are quick to point out to you that search engines are only way to achieve substantial traffic. That is simply not true. One disturbing idea promoted heavily by 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 web, whether they are text links, banners or email links to visit any site you need to click a link. Google itself is one enormous searchable link database.

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

There you are running your bar, it's a fairly busy little bar with plenty of regular customers. You also get other customers who come from all directions. Some make their way to your bar using all little country back roads (from links on other websites), others come on big highway (the Internet) from big bars in city (The Search Engines).

Your customers usually stay and have a beer or two (read a few pages of your site), then decide they'd like to try somewhere different. Because you realize your customers are bound to leave at some point anyway, you recommend bar down road, telling them it is a great bar too. You even show them a little leaflet you made (your link section), which gives them directions on how to find it.

The bar down road also has his regulars, plus a few visitors from you, and a few from bars in city. He knows you send him customers, so when his customers have had a drink or two, and fancy going somewhere different, he returns favour, recommends your bar and gives them directions how to get there.

In fact, there are 10 little bars in your area that are all doing this and local back roads are alive with customers going from bar to bar (The World Wide Web). Occasionally, when someone comes from big bars in city (the Search Engines), you recommend other local bars and all your friends benefit from that visitor too.

Then one day big bar in city sent all local bars a letter saying: "We are a much bigger bar than you, we have thousands of customers, and they are all looking for nice little country bars like yours. We would be glad to recommend your bar, however, we need to know that your bar is popular before we tell our customers. The busier your bar is, more customers we will send you. We will of course be sending one of our employees to see just how busy your bar is (Search Engine link spiders).

Great you think, more new customers, more business, more profits. Oh no! Wait a minute! If you send your customers to bar down road, he would be busier than you, and get all new customers from city. Better stop sending them there. So you stop recommending his bar, and hide little leaflets that gave directions. (You feature your link section only with a tiny little text link right at bottom of page.)

You can't get rid of your leaflets, or other bar may take you off his leaflet, then when employee from city visits other bar he will think you are not popular, because you are not listed. Maybe you could change title of your leaflet, so it doesn't look like directions to other bars, that way your customers won't pick it up. (Call your links page "resources" or "partners").

Now, when your customer has had their first beer or two, you don't recommend your friend, and they don't find leaflets, so they don't know there is a back road that leads to other bars. The result? They take highway (the Internet) and go back to big bar in city where they came from (The Search Engine).