I’m often asked, “If my site gets lots of traffic, this will help with search engines, right?”.
The answer is a resounding….it depends. Let’s take a look at two possible meanings and It’ll be more clear:
1. If my site gets more traffic (via PPC, my employees, etc.) then Google will see that the site is popular and rank me higher?
No. Google does not determine the popularity of your site by its number of visits, but by the number of high quality sites that link to you. The amount of traffic doesn’t directly impact your PR or Alexa score from what I’ve been able to see.
A collection of SEO’s on this forum about traffic and PR agree with me.
2. If my site is getting lots of traffic, and contains high quality content, then it is more likely to get linked to, helping my rank in search engines.
Yes. The more people you have coming to your site, the better chance you have of getting good links.
Simple as that (currently :)).