Quite often, someone will come to me and ask if they should spend all kinds of money on search engine optimization so their site gets higher in “The Google.” Almost always I will tell them no. While it is good to have an understanding of how search engines view your pages, paying someone to basically spam them by submitting your site over and over can have adverse effects by moving you farther down the list or worse, blacklisted.

There are however some things you can do to increase your site visibility, but it requires some work on your part.

Use The Tools You Already Have

Chances are if you own a business you have documents that you send to clients. Envelopes, letterheads, brochures, sales receipts, etc. You may even have television and radio commercials. When you talk with people you more than likely hand out business cards. When you send an e-mail, do you add your website address to your signature? Your website address should be on everything attached to your business.

Without promoting your website along with your business your page views can suffer.

Keep Your Site Updated

One of the worst things you can do for your site is to have it built then never touch it again. Most search engines will crawl your site on a regular basis, but if the information contained in those pages is months or even years old it is considered irrelevant. Even if your business information doesn’t change you can create a blog to write about things pertaining to your business or add a newsfeed to keep clients and customers informed about your business.

When you update your site it remains relevant to search engines and stays higher on the list when doing nothing at all.

Be Active Online

By participating in blogs and forums you can drive traffic to your site with minimal to no effort. Simply adding a link within your blog comments or including your web address in your forum profile signature can communicate directly with the people who buy your products and services and even attract new ones.

Social networking is the decade’s most cost effective marketing tool. By creating accounts on Facebook and Twitter you can post bite-sized updates about what you or your business is doing. When someone is interested to read further, they can visit your website. Recently, Bing and Google started crawling those profiles and including them in their search results, which has the added bonus of referrals from those sites.

By adding a link to your website to your daily Internet activities it creates links back to your site, which again, in the brain of a search engine, makes the information on your pages more relevant than a website sitting all alone in the great sea that contains billions of websites. You are now part of a community and your traffic statistics will reflect that.

What we’ve briefly touched on here today is that by promoting your website in the things you probably do anyway can influence your website pages views and in turn bring you more business, more popularity, and bring your site higher on search engines when people are looking for a product or service you offer.

Do you do anything with your traditional marketing to promote your website? What’s been effective for you?