May 10
7
As a small business owner, I am looking for the best possible way to get my company’s website out to the masses as quickly as possible. At the suggestion of a website designer, I built my site using the WordPress blogging software, and it has turned out to make my life dramatically easier (and far less expensive than traditional website design).
In working toward maximizing my Internet exposure, I have found three key tools that allow me to work toward optimizing my site and distribute my information to the multitude of social networks and key search engines. Two of these tools are free WordPress plugins and one is a website that grabs the information from your blog.
The three powerful tools are:
- SEO Smart Links (WordPress Plugin)
- Google XML Sitemaps (WordPress Plugin)
- Ping.fm (and the SuperFeedr tool) – website tool
SEO Smart Links (WordPress plugin) – This plugin allows you to automatically build links within your site based on keywords you select. We all know that anchor text and links help to build your SEO rankings within the major search engines, but always having to manually create the links in your site is very time consuming. With SEO Smart Links, you simply choose the keyword(s) you want to have linked and as you add content to your site the system will automatically create those links. You can limit the number of occurrences of any one work or set of words and also how many words per page you can link (so that you don’t over saturate your site with links)
Google XML Sitemaps (WordPress plugin) – Keeping the search engines apprised of your website changes is critical to having them index your site frequently, but constantly having to update your sitemap via FTP is a pain. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. It works automatically, so every time you change your site it updates your sitemap and updates the search engines.
Ping.fm (and the SuperFeedr tool) – Ping.fm is an excellent tool to get your blog feeds out to the world. With a single Ping.fm account, you can set up an auto-distribution out to all of your other social networking sites, which allows you to increase your exposure exponentially. Ping.fm alone is great, but if you partner that with the SuperFeedr tool that they provide, you can automate the whole process. Once you have all of your social network relationships set up through Ping.fm, you can use the SuperFeedr tool to automatically grab the new posts to your site. Now, once you post something to your blog, this dynamic duo will grab the new post and then distribute it to all of your social networking sites without even one extra click on your behalf. It doesn’t get easier than that!
As a small business owner you don’t have time to spend updating all of your social networking site and major search engines. These tools will allow you to ‘set it and forget it’ and keep your company’s information constantly flowing into the web.
Jeffrey W. Arnold
Principal, Pocket-Promo.com
