Article writing and distribution — it’s one of those multipart arts that’s extraordinarily hard for one person to really master. Most people — myself included — who have a modicum of talent at writing (in all humility) simply don’t have the kind of patience or detail-oriented mindset to follow through with the long, complex, and ultimately boring process of properly submitting those articles. Similarly, the kinds of minds that make mincemeat out of article distribution generally aren’t capable of producing copy that normal human beings enjoy consuming.

But, for all of it’s pain-in-the-butt-ness, article writing and distribution is the pinnacle of organic SEO. It creates backlinks that have nearly every element of a perfect backlink: they’re

• Context controlled: the creator gets to determine the content around the link.
• Anchor text controlled: the creator gets to determine the anchor text used.
• Authoritative: a good article directory pulls a LOT of juice.
• Persistent: most article directories only take down an article if they’re legally obligated to do so.
• Replicable: turning in the same article to many different directories gets you many different backlinks from different root domains.
• Relinkable: you can profit greatly from linking TO your article from other sources as well as linking FROM your article to your site, thus expanding your sales funnel.

That’s nothing to shake a stick at — but there’s an entire other level of power to a well-written article: the power to act as an extension of your brand. In effect, when a surfer lands on an article you’ve written and then they clickthrough and see your website, they permanently connect the quality and content of the article with that website. As such, if you get someone to write you a killer article, you can actually improve the conversion rate of the visitors that click through that particular link to get to your site.

In short, while articles take a lot of time and effort — at least, the ones that will be of actual value to your business in the long run do — the value they create is well worth it.

The days weren’t too long ago that local internet marketing was regarded as something that belonged exclusively in the realm of brick and mortar businesses. The logic behind this stance is fairly inexorable: local internet marketing only affects people who search for businesses that exist in a specific location, and by and large, online businesses don’t have that particularly three-dimensional, spatial quality we associate with locality.

But that’s changing recently. Just as many brick-and-mortar businesses are starting to build their online presences, hiring webmasters and SEO companies to alert Google to the fact that they exist at a specific location, so many web-only businesses are starting to develop a healthy respect for the power of local internet marketing. It might seem a bit counterintuitive that a business that doesn’t have a local presence would target a specific market, but there are a couple of good reasons why this might be the case.

Market Segmentation
When you have a geographically centered market segment — for example, Spam Sushi has a market centered almost completely in Hawaii with a nascent following in South Korea — local internet marketing becomes an obvious choice even if your website serves customers worldwide. You might be the best Spam Sushi maker in New York City, but when you realize that 90% of your orders come from Maui because some guy there discovered your skills and spread the word, of course you’re going make sure that your name comes up in that neighborhood.

Return on Investment
Local internet marketing is highly affordable SEO. Compared to the effort it takes to rank for a keyword like “children’s podiatry”, ranking for a keyword like “Gramercy Park children’s podiatry” is trivial in terms of both time and cost. Even if your market isn’t as highly segmented as the market for Spam Sushi, you can totally still improve your traffic and sales if you target a large enough city and perform some quality local internet marketing for it. With the effort it would take to get on the front page of “low carb diet”, you could get into the first place for “low carb diet Dallas”, “low carb diet Minneapolis”, “low carb diet St. Louis” and a dozen other major cities.

Some kinds of SEO work are like building a full-sized house with Legos — adding thousands and thousands of small pieces together in order to build something truly worth having. Others are more like roulette: you either go viral and hit it big, or you get basically nothing for your work. Engaging a press release service is one of those rare SEO techniques that are both.

Just like a backlink you get from a one-off blog comment or a barely-comprehensible article turned in to an unknown article directory, a press release creates a backlink on the website of whatever press release aggregator you turn it in to. In that way, it’s a Lego brick: just one more smidgen of influence flowing into your website from a distant authoritative site on the other side of the Internet.

On the other hand, a press release has a special advantage over almost any other kind of SEO document. Press release aggregators are read by members of the press, and if your press release is truly noteworthy, it can get syndicated. That means dozens, hundreds, or (in the extreme) even thousands of backlinks flooding in from a huge variety of sites from across the Internet.

Needless to say, the website SEO benefits of that kind of viral burst are enormous, and they almost assure that your site will achieve a new level of traffic — which means a new level of income. Also needless to say, that kind of viral traffic is a very rare occurrence even with the frequently-combed press release aggregators and a powerful writer on your side.

But because press releases are always good for the same kind of backlink that a toss-off article or a blog comment is, there’s always a solid reason to write and submit a press release (or have an SEO company do it for you, more likely.) That’s why, every time you have almost any kind of announcement from your web based business, having a press release service write and submit a solid press release for you is always a good idea — it’s like getting a free lottery ticket along with your chicken at the grocery store. Why would you ever turn that down?

There are a lot of elements to search engine optimization — and no one has the time and resources to put them all into play at once. Particularly when you’re looking at doing small business SEO — helping a mom and pop store establish a web presence for itself — you have to pick and choose carefully which kinds of activities will have the best benefit on their business.

To that end, you have to choose at the outset what kind of strategy you’re going to use. Will you concentrate on driving traffic to their website and trying to make sales online? Or will you concentrate on driving traffic through their doors and trying to make sales face to face? The difference between those options is the difference between internet marketing and local internet marketing.

When you engage in internet marketing, you’re trying to make money online. When you engage in local internet marketing, you’re performing many of the same kinds of activities, but you’re attaching location-based keywords to the entire process. So you might still be building backlinks by creating web 2.0 properties and social bookmarks and whatnot, but instead of using “inexpensive board games” as your anchor text, you’ll use “board games Olympia WA”.

The location specificity immediately guarantees that you cut out 99.9% of competing pages, especially if you’re in a rural area or a small town. (If you’re in New York, you might need to get more specific, like “Gramercy Park board games” for example.) But more than just ranking easily due to lack of competition, local internet marketing has different-looking results in Google.

That’s because Google understands location names and immediately returns results specific to that location. If your business is listed in Google’s business directory, it’ll show up in the location-specific SERPs. If it’s got more backlinks/authority/juice than the other businesses in your area, it’ll show up on the top of the list and get more clicks.

More importantly, however, it will also show up on the top of the MAP results, showing people how to get to your front door and walk inside. That’s how you drive flesh and blood traffic from the internet, and it’s invaluable.