In personal branding, there’s an old saying that goes something like: “If you need to question whether you have a personal brand, you probably don’t have a personal brand.”

In the cheerful echo chamber of business advice offered online, the above statement would be an outlier. In fact, in 1997, Fast Company predicted that the personal branding revolution was just underway. If you read the piece, it sounds like something a management ‘guru’ would post on LinkedIn today. But it just isn’t true. In 2005, Fast Company published a moratorium on this idea, concluding that not everyone needs to be “the CEO of Me Inc.”

But to this day, the idea persists that every service-based company and individual who provide a service needs a strong personal brand. But in the modern world of e-commerce retailers and software as a service (SaaS) solution providers, driving the right kind of traffic to your website through link building may be more important than the conversations surrounding your company through the use of PR placements, at least from a sales point of view.

The real wisdom is to know the difference between the two methods, and know whether a strong brand will actually help your company continue to provide services and expand into offering even more. Likes, comments, and views are nice, but they aren’t major drivers of sales and won’t do much for your bottom line in the long run if they aren’t followed up with a strong digital PR strategy.

With that in mind, here’s a comprehensive look at the practices of Link Building and Digital PR as it relates to SEO.