6 Quick Marketing Tips To Adopt Now6 Quick Marketing Tips To Adopt Now

Claim your Google Maps listing. McGee suggests searching for yourself by your business name and city name. If you find yourself, click on the Edit link and then click on Claim Your Business. McGee says problems often befall smaller businesses that don't claim their listings.

Do the same at Yahoo Local and Microsoft Live Search Maps. Follow similar steps as above, McGee says. Yahoo asks, Own This Business? And Microsoft has a link to Change Your Business Listing. To create listings, click here for Yahoo and here for Microsoft. McGee also recommends claiming or editing your listings on Citysearch, Yelp, online yellow pages, and similar sites.

Claim your social media name/profiles. Even if you're not on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or MySpace, McGee recommends you create profiles using your company name on these and other top social-networking sites. McGee says that even if you never use these profiles, at least you'll be sure no one else will be using them.

Do basic online reputation management. Because bad reviews can spread quickly, McGee recommends that in order to keep track of what people are saying about your business, use Google Alerts. You can monitor your own name, your company name, and the names of important people in your company. McGee suggests choosing "comprehensive" alerts and getting them once a day. McGee also suggests learning how to use RSS and subscribing to RSS feeds of your company name and important staff names.

Check your foundational links. McGee says to make sure you're listed in Yahoo Directory, Open Directory (which is free), Business.com, and Best of the Web directories. While directory listings aren't a "golden ticket" to high search engine visibility, McGee says, they represent the foundation of a link-building effort. He also recommends reviewing the internal links on your Web site and making sure you use keywords in anchor text when possible. For example, when links say, "Click here," McGee says to change them to describe the content on the page you're linking to -- "red widgets" is better anchor text than "click here."

Get involved with your analytics. McGee insists companies have Web analytics and says Google Analytics is "more than adequate" for smaller businesses. He then recommends you pay attention to the data: Look at what keywords are sending natural search traffic to your site and look at what other sites are referring traffic to you. McGee says marketing opportunities are to be found in both of those data sets. Use the e-mail function to have Google Analytics send the data to your inbox, McGee suggests, rather than attempt to remember to check the analytics regularly.