Free Tools for your Website!
Most small business owners know they need a website. But what steps can you take as a small business owner yourself, to increase your chances of being found by those who might be searching for your products and/or services? Contrary to popular belief, you can take some simple and basic steps that can help your website get off to a great start or be the beginning of a new, fresh start for an older site. And best of all, they are all 100% completely FREE!
Here are our Top 5 Free Marketing Tools you can implement now:
- Create and Install an XML Sitemap and Robots TXT File – Creating an XML Sitemap and Robots TXT file and installing them on your domain will tell the search engines what to crawl and what to index when they do crawl them. You can set the crawl frequency, tell the search engines what not to crawl and have certain pages not included in your indexing. CAUTION: Please be careful if you choose to tell the search engines what to NOT crawl and index. One mistake and you can literally remove your entire site from the search engine indexing.
- Submit your website URL to DMOZ and other free, niche directories – It’s a well known SEO (search engine optimization) technique to submit your website URL to high ranking PR directories, however, the key here is to submit to relevant, niche directories that will enhance your website reputation and listings. These are sometimes hard to find and sometimes even harder to get listed in. However, they are search engine gold if you do it right!
- Create (and use) a Google Analytics Account – Google Analytics gives you a lot of information that you can use to adjust or tweak your web site or SEO program. It can give you traffic by type, number, location(s) and keywords. You can run history reports, traffic reports, keyword reports and more! The real question is why wouldn’t you choose to use this free tool?
- Start a Blog – I know it seems like a huge resource and time suck, but it really is the best investment in time you can spend on your web site. Install it on your domain and it costs you nothing with one of many free blogging platforms (like WordPress). Create new, unique and fresh content for site, establish yourself as an industry expert, garner back-links and build your website authority and trust with the the search engines.
- Create and use Social Media Accounts – Twitter is a prime example of a completely free social media platform that can literally transform your business. Far too many businesses have been skyrocketed to the top of their respective markets by combining the right amount of useful information and promotion. Make no mistake about it, if you are not on Facebook and Twitter you are losing in some way. BONUS TIP: Use Social Media Platforms (like Twitter and Facebook) as a way to share your expertise, industry news and more about your business philosophy and NOT to try and sell. Social Media enthusiasts hate being “sold” on these platforms and they will drop you like yesterdays newspaper if they feel your only reason for existence is to sell them something.
So there they are. Five completely free and useful tools that if implemented and used properly, can have an immediate impact on your website performance, traffic and search engine rankings. If you want to learn more about these or any of our services, you can read more about Organic Search Engine Services here at click-finders.com.
If you enjoyed this article or learned something from it, please share it! There are a host of social media bookmarking and sharing tools both for this blog and each article. Google+, Facebook, Digg, Delicious and Twitter…just to name a few!
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Mike,
This is really good stuff. Question though…Do you have any tips for actually getting listed in DMOZ? I have submitted my web site 3 times and been rejected each time. The first time I could understand because it was a half hearted submission. However, after much research and reading and coming to understand exactly how important that site is, I spent some serious time and effort on the last two submissions, only to be rejected twice more.
Can you help?
Hi David,
Thanks for reading and the comment.
The short answer is this….DMOZ is the hardest FREE directory to submit to and to get accepted in IMHO. If you feel like you have followed the guidelines carefully each of the two times you submitted after your first rejection, then it’s highly likely you are selecting an improper category for your website. I have found more often than not, that is the case. Since each site is manually reviewed by a live person and those people have very strict instructions and guidelines about approvals, this is most often the reason for rejection. You are basing your interpretation of your sites category against theirs. And most times in these cases the two are just not on the same page.
My first recommendation would be to try a similar, but different category. If that does not work after a couple of different categories, you may want to try and hire a professional submission service to try and submit for you. We have submitted many sites and have an AWESOME approval rating. Remember, it can take up to 180+ days for them to review each submission so be methodical in your submission and patient as you wait for a response!
Best of luck to you David! And thanks again for reading, commenting and asking a great question!
What lierbaitng knowledge. Give me liberty or give me death.
Two other great free website marketing tools is WordStream’s AdWords Performance Grader: http://www.wordstream.com/google-adwords and Hubspots Website Grader http://websitegrader.com/
Two great tools to assess your performance and identify areas to focus to improve your web marketing results.
I think one of the most useful steps a small business can take is to get listed in Google places. It’s free, quite easy and there’s tons of information on how to do it best.
The conversion rate on Google places is one of the highest you can get today given that your website appears in the first places. If the product/ service domain is not very competitive -you’ll have the best chances to appear at a high place and get a great exposure.
Hi Anya – So true…Google places should always be a TOP priority for any small business with a website!
Thanks so much for reading and for the comment!
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ABSOLUTLEY ! As long as you link back to the original article for credit!
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@Cooley & @christopher – Thanks so much for reading and commenting!
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@Taylor – Our blog feed is [http://www.click-finders.com/blog/feed/]. You are free to repost any article in part (snippet) with a link back to the full article here. Thanks for reading and for sharing this content!
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You have permission to repost this article as long as you give FULL credit to Mike Glover @ click-fidners.com with a link back to the original article here.
Glad you enjoyed it and want to help spread the word! Thanks!
Well, its just 1week earlier i have created the twitter account and using now, and surprisingly getting 40 p/w from twitter (its a bit, but really m happy wit that for now). Really, till date i wasn’t aware of that, twitter is something every webmaster should start early.
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