Photo: Sharyn Morrow

No matter what type of marketing you are engaged in (search marketing, email marketing, social marketing, etc.), the first, and perhaps most important, thing you can do is ensure you are providing relevant and useful content.

Most companies could benefit by spending more time thinking about what they can do to continually provide value to their customers, followers, fans, etc.  Marketing is made so much easier if you have something of interest.  Content is still king.

In order to drive traffic from search engines, those search engines have to be able to find your pages.  Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all provide free webmaster tools that help you determine how much of your site is being crawled and indexed and identify potential problems (plus other valuable information).

If you haven’t checked them out yet, you should:

• Google Webmaster Tools 
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Microsoft/Bing Webmaster Central