Professional website design? Check. Useful information, links, and content? Check. SEO optimized text and headlines for higher rankings? Check. Off site SEO used where applicable? Check—wait, you don’t have your off site materials search engine optimized? Then your website will only be as good as it is on its own two feet. You built your website to sell a product, service, or to give information. You used various off site tools to market and promote your website and increase traffic. How are people going to find your off site materials if they aren’t as equally optimized as the site itself?

If you haven’t done this, don’t panic. There is plenty of time to go back through article directories and directory listings to improve the items that you have placed there. Whether you’re looking to increase a particular keyword in an article, or just to change the link text of your directory listings, you need to make sure that you are using the right keywords every single time. Having a 100% optimized website will do you no good if your marketing materials aren’t optimized, as well. Unless someone decides to do a search on ‘the way to find the best internet marketing tools online’, your articles and directory listings that have this common phrase aren’t likely to turn up.

You need to focus on the same keywords, or similar ones, that you chose for your website. Create articles based on those keywords, and find quality directories where you can post a link and include relevant keywords in those links. Never, ever let your marketing materials go out into the world un-optimized, because like a child without a chaperone, they will quickly get lost in the sea of cyberspace, and may prove to be a complete waste of time without the proper optimization.

If you want your business to reach the heights that it is more than capable of reaching, you need to optimize EVERY single thing that you put out there. Never use bad directory listings or focus on listing everywhere. Instead, focus on creating quality links that are optimized to produce results. When it comes to article marketing, SEO is key. Whether you write your own articles or outsource, you need to maintain a 1%-2% keyword density so that search engines don’t shun your articles, just like you did with your website. Now that you have a little more insight about all the uses of SEO, you should be able to find traffic generation much easier than it was before.