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Google has a wonderful habit of creating some of the most powerful & well-designed tools, and then providing them for free. Adding these tools lets Google collect better data on your website and traffic, thus boosting your search engine rank.
Google Analytics gives highly detailed reports on web traffic, with great charts and visuals. See who found you, how they found you, and what they’re after.
Google Webmaster Tools provides reports on how to improve your site’s compatibility and user experience. You can even initiate manual “crawls” – that is, prompt Google to fetch your website and re-index its content, rather than waiting for Google to auto-crawl periodically.
Google AdWords will also give a huge boost to traffic… but this article is titled “free” methods! Google paid search ads are very affordable though, and can see good results. It’s a common rumor that Google plays favorites, even in the organic (unpaid) search results, with those companies that pay them.
Call me to get started setting these up!
If you haven’t heard of the Zoho family of products, definitely ask us for a demo! They are continuously releasing innovative new apps; at the time of this article, there are 28 integrated cloud-based products doing everything from CRM, email marketing, a quickbooks alternative, HR recruiting, and much more.
The best part – every Zoho product has a free account service level. These aren’t limited trials or demos, and they don’t sell your data like other free products do.
Zoho SalesIQ is a chat box & tracking feature for your website. You can see it in the lower right corner of our page. This allows our visitors to initiate a chat with us, and turn visits into sales. We can even see a live map of you on the site right now, on this page, and start a chat with you!
The web standard for helping search engines index your page is the <meta> tag. These tags are data such as keywords, title, and description that you place in your site’s header. They are invisible to the viewers, but the search engine robots are searching for them; this is what they’ll display in search results.
Keep these tags relevant, and limited. Use them liberally but don’t go overboard – they get ignored after a certain limit.
Perhaps that’s what brought you here.
Everyone has their website URL in their footer, but it won’t generate too much attention. Consider making an article just like mine for your business — “10 Best ___”, or “5 Common Mistakes when ___”.
It’s a great passive way to engage the people you email every day.
Singlehandedly, unequivocally, hands-down the best thing you can do to improve your page ranks! For all the paid SEO services in the world, nothing compares to genuine, new, fresh content.
The internet is a fast place. When the Google robots are crawling your page and see nothing has changed since their last visit, you fall behind.
Too many business sites are “digital brochures.” A nice pamphlet that was beautifully designed and published online for the world to see — and then never changed since 2011. If you can find time, even a couple times per month, to post something new on your site, the effect is far more profound than everything else in this article combined.
First, a true little story. I have a friend who sold penny stocks back in the 80’s. He was doing a lot of cold calling and he told me about a sales system he used.
He would start with a list of 100 cold names. He would call them with something like,
“You don’t know me and you should not invest with me until I’ve proven myself. I just want you to watch Stock X for a month. I promise you it will go up.”
Actually, he told 50 of those 100 people that it would go up. He told the other 50 it would go down. After a month, he threw away the 50 names he had been wrong with and called the 50 he was right about.
He would tell them to now look at Stock Y. He told 25 of those 50 that Y would go up and the other 25 it would go down. You can see where this is going. After four rounds, he had 6 people remaining who watched him pick 4 straight stocks without fail.
From their perspective, he was a genius.
What does this story have to do with Email Marketing? You need to look at your communications from the recipient’s perspective. A very common mistake in Email Marketing (and sales people in general) is to talk about yourself and all of the things you can do or all of things your company does. Most clients only want to know what you can do for them.
If you put 10 different points forward into your Email and 9 don’t apply to a particular reader, then the reader will wonder why he is getting these messages as they don’t apply to him/her.
Another story – A very long time ago I worked for a business that sold measuring instruments. Specifically, we could measure the amount of liquid in a tank. The liquid could be milk, sewage, gasoline, etc. The same product could be sold to many industries.
But engineers in each of these industries had very specific needs and these needed to be addressed.
The dairy engineer was very worried about bacterial growth. He wanted to know the product was smooth and easily cleaned. He also wanted to know that we could ship overnight replacements if one failed. Dairies cannot turn off the cows and production must be maintained.
The sewage treatment facility was usually a municipality and wanted low pricing, usually by a bid process.
The gasoline storage facility wanted to make sure the device did not put any electricity or sparks into the tank. The term is “Explosion Proof”. They also hated leaks as it got the EPA interested in them.
If we had sent out a Newsletter with a picture of a sewage treatment plant, the dairy engineer wouldn’t be impressed. He’d think “These people don’t know me”. So we began to create a series of Newsletters that were very targeted and spoke specifically to their needs.
We created a “Food, Dairy & Pharmaceutical” Newsletter, a Wastewater Newsletter, etc. Over time the readers began to think of us a experts who were uniquely devoted to their business.
I was recently asked a question about adding non-standard field types to swiftpage surveys, such as date, time, number, password, etc. After a short amount of tinkering I found a semi-complex workaround that gets the job done to some extent. I was able to update an ACT contact with a number type, imported through the […]
Swiftpage President and CEO H. John Oechsle talks about the new branding for Swiftpage, Act! and Saleslogix and some exciting changes for these businesses. Brand Update for Swiftpage, Act! and Saleslogix from Act! on Vimeo.
I recently went through a process of updating our email hosting provider to add SPF records. Sage E-Marketing (AKA Swiftpage) uses email spoofing to make it appear as though emails are coming from your domain. I found no other documentation on this specific scenario, so I’ll write up my efforts for anyone else interested. […]