[djhomeless]

I guess I would question the value in striving for high PR. Modern SEO is far more about engaging with the social scene than hunting down obscure link directories/blogs.

If you have a cool service, then find a way to get people to tweet about it. imho, a far more relevant way to drive awareness.

[MicahWedemeyer]

Google can send you a ton of high value traffic. Getting on Google page 1 can be done (almost) by yourself, without having to convince others to tweet, blog, share on facebook, etc. Plus, once you're there, it takes very little effort to stay, as compared with staying relevant in the social web.

Social is the hot thing right now, but when you're starting at zero, SEO is still a great way to bootstrap yourself to decent traffic.

[ericd]

Yep, the bursty, generally curious (rather than intentful) traffic from social media links absolutely pales in comparison with the consistent, large, and high-converting amount of traffic Google can send.

Social media is much better at engaging with customers to get feedback and figure out where the holes in your product are.

[thinkbohemian]

I couldn't agree more.

[thinkbohemian]

ShadyEmail has a component of that, it encourages you to email your friends with a shady address. But by and large I get much more traffic from google than through random twitter links, etc (Of course this could just mean that i need to spend more time on this type of social marketing).

Viral-marketing & social marketing is still just marketing, i've been behind the scenes on a few campaigns that "went viral" and though they fail readily if you don't have the content to support them, even good content needs to be driven to critical mass before it catches on. Even then it dies out quickly without someone pushing the iniative.

[djhomeless]

I don't think any one approach is right or wrong, but for me Facebook+Twitter drive 3-4x more traffic to my site than Google. Getting good google "juice" is important, but not as important as it was a few years ago.