I received this from WIKIO this morning, apparently my website (or blog if you like), has entered the top 500 important European Blogs. Jumping in straight to position 39 is not bad at all and I must admit that it is with pride I am accepting this award. I did on some forums previously discuss this tactic where offering awards and recognition was an excellent way to build back links. My view remains unchanged on that topic, however – my attitude has changed significantly as I have since then both seen and implemented techniques that drives traffic (qualified traffic at that) by employing these.

Benefits with awards are that you and your niche finds new ideas and websites through this. Say for example that your favourite blogger would suddenly start promoting some other website. While he or she may be promoting for their own financial gain, they would not entirely go out and promote just anything – at least not if they really care about you as their readers. Bloggers and Article Writers are highly attuned to their readers needs and wants and will not be pushing you to buy something, rather they will promote an item or service and give you an angle that is comfortable enough for you to perform your own research and form your own opinion. From the other (business) end is that Bloggers are an extraordinary and exceptionally powerful force in driving highly educated and qualified traffic.

In other news for SEO Shepherd

We have finally found a stable and reliable hosting service that can handle the high amount of traffic that SEO Shepherd receives. First of all we would like to apologise that our website has been acting less than optimally during the past 4 months, but we now got good and exciting changes. The developers are finally done and we should have the final design in place along with all the services we promised to deliver during 2011. Stay tuned and please bear with us as we perform the final changes to SEO Shepherd. If you have any queries please send them through to antispam@seo-shepherd.com