5. Use Google’s Web Toolkit
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!
4. Try out Zoho SalesIQ
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!
3. Use <meta> tags
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.
2. Put an interesting link in your email signature
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.
1. Update often!
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.