Search engine traffic versus link traffic.

I've always read (and it makes sense to believe) that search engine traffic is the best kind of traffic because it's very targetted--people are actively looking for what your site contains (usually).

But one of my sites in particular gets a lot of traffic from a link that's on another site with a similar theme. Would that traffic be just as good as the search engine traffic? What do you think?

[rainbore]

There's no hard and fast answer to this, but generally speaking I think a user who finds your site through a link on another site is actually more likely to be among your target audience. Search engine traffic includes a lot of users who don't phrase their query well enough to really find what they're looking for. And I get a lot of traffic on my collectibles site from users who just want to download graphics. The logs show a lot of searches that include the terms "graphics" and "pictures". And like you, that site gets a steady stream of traffic from two or three link partners, for which I'm grateful enough to make sure their links on my site are given a bit of added prominence.