Today we were faced with the age old question: what is more important to a webmaster page rank or website traffic? In order to answer this question we must first answer a few other questions that come into play when developing a search engine marketing strategy: what did you expect from an SEO campaign and what is your ultimate goal?

It is amazing to know that not many people actually have plans regarding their websites other than making money which is a good goal but it does not provide specific steps in order to achieve this goal. Having a clear marketing strategy for your site should be the first thing that comes to mind even before you start to develop it. There are many ways to monetize a website, you could run advertisements or sell ad space, sell links, join an affiliate program, etc. you must choose one or a combination of these in order to generate revenue.

Ever since Google invented the page rank system webmasters and have been puzzled about the idea of increasing their website rank and manipulating the system. Simply put, page rank is a rating system which analyzes several of page and on page factors in order to increase the popularity of certain page on a website, factors such as link popularity, page relevance, unique content, and anchor texts used to link back to the page, linked authority of the sources linking in, are all taken in consideration by the page rank algorithm when evaluating a certain page. Webmasters look to increase their page rank because obviously pages with a higher page rank will appear higher on the search engine results pages and people will be able to find such a page without having to dig too deep, a higher page rank obviously represents more traffic for a specific site, this is one of the reasons why a higher page rank is highly ambitioned.

Traffic on the other hand, is the blood of every online operation, without traffic there is no business to be done and a site loses importance, so even if a website has a high page rank but no traffic it is considered dead. When people talk about conversions they are referring to visitors who purchased the product or service they offer, referred sales is what makes money in the world of cost per action advertising, and without a steady inflow of visitors there can be no sales.

If we compare both traffic and page rank you might conclude that they are both highly important, and they are but you need to decide which one is more relevant to the way you do business online. Pages which require a high page rank represent money due to the fact that they are able to pass on link equity to the pages or sites it links to, webmasters can take advantage of such pages in order to sell links to people who are interested in enhancing their search engine ranking. Have been a lot of traffic on the other hand, also provides a lot of benefits to website owners who run specific offers from cost per action networks, having a lot of visitors is what ultimately every Internet marketer wants because they can't be converted into sales or referrals; those who possess a lot of traffic can either sell it or direct it to customized landing pages.

So what do you do if you have a high page rank but no visitors? Or what you do if you have a lot of visitors but no page rank? The answer is for you to decide taking in consideration which one is more relevant to your business model.