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All SEO’s know that writing articles and press releases are effective ways of building links and increasing website traffic. The question is, “Are your press releases and articles optimized?”

An easy way to determine if your text is optimized is by using keyword and word tracking tools. These tools, which you use to write text for your web pages, can also increase the effectiveness of your link building text, and give your writers guidance when selecting their topics. You want your content to be not only relevant and useful but also optimized in the same manner as the text on your web pages.

Optimized writing is, in essence, a double edged sword. If done correctly it will increase your web traffic and garner those precious links that you desire.

Good Luck
Controller

April is shaping up to be an extremely busy month for me and the Comit crew, and it looks like I will have to miss another conference. We are gearing up for a tradeshow and festival that will be happening at the same time as Pubcon Boston. I’m kinda bummed out about it but duty calls.

If you too are unable to attend, don’t fret, because there are guys out there who are doing a great job of sharing what they learn, at these conferences, with everyone else. Some even go as far as to post speaches and Q&A’s verbatum.

Search Engine Roundtable is usually the best place to start looking for a recap of the conference. This site always has good coverage of SEO events, and sometimes, Barry posts reviews during the conference rather than waiting till the end.

Jim and Todd also have nice recaps of the conferences that they attend. Then again, I’m sure everyone who goes to the conference will post something about it on their blog.

Even with all these people reporting, I’d still rather be there in person.

The amount of traffic that your website receives is directly related to the amount and quality of your inbound links. In most cases you should focus on quality first, and Michael Martinez does a great job of explaining this in one of his recent articles on SEOmoz.

Michael puts directory links into three categories “Yahoo Class Links”, “CNN Class Links”, and “Business Class Links” and explains the criteria for each. This article is a good read for people who cannot figure out why their website is ranking below a site with half as many links.

That being said, I still suggest grabbing the low hanging fruit first, and in this case we are talking about directories. Directory submission should be the first step taken when building links. Be aware, though, that not all directories are worth your time and money. Many of them require reciprocal linking that will drain your link value, and some don’t even rank in SERP’s. However if a particular directory will help drive traffic to your site then by all means you should submit to it.

There has been a bit of debate concerning the value of directories (for SEO), and there are some good reports on this subject. SEO Book is probably one of the best I’ve seen so far. In his article, Aaron addresses “quality signals”, like ad ratio, quality ratio, SERP ranking, and relevancy, that contribute to the value of directories.

The Comit Technologies’ link building team has conducted research that has helped them identify the 26 best directories to submit your site to. These are all trusted/human reviewed directories that pass on page rank and link value. They begin every link building campaign by manually submitting to each of these directories. Through these submissions alone I have noticed increases in website traffic and better search engine rankings.

Submitting your sites to directories can give you a quick boost in the search engines, but do not rely on them. It is imperative that you have an assortment of links from different types of relevant websites. Having only directory links will not work.

Good Luck
iTraffic

When it comes to writing, customers should be your number one consideration. Remember that you are selling to people and not search engines. Of course you want the search engines to find your site but you also want pages that are rich with useful content. Overloading your text with key words and phrases may increase your search engine visibility but it will in turn hurt the overall validity of your website.

Content is the key to increasing website traffic. If it is creative and useful it will convert more visits into sales and increase the popularity of your website much more effectively than a page littered with key words and phrases.

SEO is more than just driving traffic to your website, it is also about turning traffic into sales.

Most SEO advice tends to focus primarily on link building techniques, on-page factors, and search engine trends. This is all very good information, but what about Web Hosting? Every now and then neighborhoods are mentioned, but never with enough emphasis.

Not all servers are created equal and many are not search engine friendly. It would be pointless to waste time and money building links and refining code when your website is being hosted from a slow, unreliable server that is full of spammy neighbors (who you WILL be associated with by the search engines). Servers are one of the cheapest components of a website, but they are very important.

Here are a few things to consider before you choose a server.

• Does the web host have 301 Redirect capabilities? This is absolutely necessary to avoid the possibility of duplicate content penalties.
• The uptime of your server is vital. There are several providers that guarantee their servers to be up 99.9% of the time.
• Your IP Class can and will be used by search engines to determine the quality of your neighborhood. Your web host should be analyzed to determine if there are any spam sites associated with its IP Class.
• Does the web host have clean name servers? You want your website to be associated with others who have clean names.
• Look for a server that provides each reseller with their own IP addresses. Hosting on a server with large amounts of sites using one IP address will significantly increase your chances of being associated with spammers.
• Does the web host support the Date Modified attribute? Search engines like to know when your pages are being modified and the Date Modified attribute makes this possible.
• Choose a server with a fast response time. This will allow search engines to crawl further into your website because they are not spending time waiting for pages to load.

Services like SEO Certified Servers are available to help you determine if your server meets these criteria. They check and certify servers for the sole purpose of SEO.

I think that it would be wise to take a closer look at your web host before launching your SEO campaign.

Good Luck
Paul