Search this, search that. All you hear about is search engines in the web marketing publications, forums and events. New owners of web sites are often told, "You're going to have to wait a year before you can rank in Google. There's a sandbox you know. You're stuck using pay per click until your organic rankings pick up." BALONEY

Before I get on too much of a hypocritical rant, I must admit that I am one of those search engine optimization practitioners that used to give the above advice. It's true for some types of sites, but for many IT IS NOT.

Marketing channels like social media marketing and new media press releases are generating an increasing amount of buzz and there's a reason for that. There are a variety of alternative channels, both new and innovative and older tried and true. Here's a list of five:

1. Social Networking - Build a social network of influential bloggers and marketers. When you announce news to this group, they'll "sneeze it" to their networks and so on and so on.
2. Ride the Digg Wave - Subscribe to relevant category RSS feeds and watch those that are rising. Be one of the first to make relevant comments if it's a blog and you'll benefit from all the traffic as that post hits the first page of Digg. Same goes for del.icio.us and slashdot.
3. Tag it up - Watch your web logs for keyword trends in the referrer data and use a tool like Hittail to identify long tail phrases. Use these phrases as your Technorati tags and for the tags you use with social bookmark and news site like del.icio.us and Digg.
4. New Media Press Release - The more media you have, the wider the net you can cast for capturing an audience. One of the best tools for distributing information with multiple media formats is the new media press release. Create a compelling news announcement, then record a 5-10 min interview (audio or video) talking about the announcement. Post the announcement details to your blog. Combine all this along with subscriptions and social bookmark options into a social media release and distribute through a savvy service like PRWeb. A strong call to action, a compelling landing page and metrics are key to the success of such a press release.
   
5. Links - Yeah, that's right links. Get links from every relevant source you can whether it's a directory or a blog or a news web site. The great thing about links is that they can send traffic and influence your search engine rankings. But for this post, we only care about the traffic. How do you get the best links? Create something clever, useful or controversial. Create content that is really worth linking to and then use the ideas above to promote it. The best links come from others that recognize on their own, that your resource is something truly valuable.
   

There you go. Five alternatives to driving traffic to your web site without using search engines. Are there more? Of course there are. But that's what companies hire search engine optimization services for.

There’s a long standing debate in the search marketing industry about links versus content. Which is better?

On the one hand there’s the perspective that if you create great content, people will link to you naturally. That’s true, but it’s a bit misleading.

On the other hand there are those that say links are the answer. You can get pages to rank well based purely on links. Again, that’s entirely possible, but such a statement does not give you all the facts.

When I read or hear people ask whether links or content are better, I liken such a question to asking, “What’s better, air or water?”. Links and content are both necessary for competitive search marketing efforts. Emphasizing one over the other depends on the situation. Excelling at both is the ideal.

The thing to understand about optimizing for search engines is that there are many ways to solve the visibility or ranking problem. There is no “one right way” to SEO. There are fundamental concepts that persist as being true, such as the need for a site to be crawler friendly and all content reachable via links, a logical site structure with relevant content and the need for inbound links from relevant sources. What differs over time and as the search engines update ranking methodologies is the execution.

The links attracted by great distribution of quality content creates a very desirable link “footprint” that is rewarded by search engines. To think this will happen naturally in any reasonable amount of time is shortsighted. To try and create the link footprint automatically is easily detected by search engines as manipulation. Unless you’re in the MFA and “churn and burn” business, automated linking solutions have no place in a search marketing program.

If you create great content and no one knows about it to link to it, you’re spinning your wheels. A combination of content as well as social networking, link networking, public relations and gaining editorial visibility as well as viral and individual link solicitations will all work together synergistically. Building a community of consumers of your content as well as relationships with the media in your industry is the distribution network necessary to gain the most link value out of creating great content.