couple questions here: are the same techniques used for PR and SERP (quality link building for both)? if not, how do they differ? how often are SERPs updated? thanks!
SERPs are updated all the time. I generally don't worry of the PR, rather I like to work on SERPs. Link building is a common technique that can help both SERP and PR.
While for increasing the PR backlinks are enough, for a good SERP you will need a good onpage optimization as well
link building for both PR and SERPs is almost the same.. wherein quality is prioritized first then quantity follows though optimization for organic rankings is still the most important here
My main aim always is to get top positions in search engines. I use link building techniques for better SERP and page rank
The techniques are same, but to get higher PR you need more amount of high pr back link pointing to your website. But for getting Higher SERP Rankings, you just need more and more links, it does not matter how much PR of back links pointing to your website.
The important thing is the search results ranking, for that we need to build lots of backlinks. Backlinks from relevant and quality pages are more important. This improves search results ranking, and with that it also improve the PR. So building backlinks will improve both PR and search results rankings.
Optimising for traffic is a bit different to optimising for PR because you can get traffic using nofollow (non-PR) links on sites such as social bookmarking sites.