In today’s environment, getting the most out of your technology investment is critical to maximizing staff productivity and bottom line profit. While training your staff to fully use the functionality in your company document  management systems is certainly important, we have found that the effective implementation of small, innovative tools can also produce significant productivity gains. In this blog we discuss our candidates for the top ten cool tools in 2009 that deserve your attention.

Read more: Nine Technology Tips to Enhance Your company's Productivity

Search engines are like any company product. They are constantly being improved to better serve their customers, and to increase their effectiveness over their competition. Over the years most of the major search engines have improved their algorithms or how they look at web pages. Let’s take a look at some of these changes and how they can impact the ranking of your web site.

The whole idea about search is to find something or some kind of information. Now that the internet has been around for over 25 years (hard to believe), there are so many web pages out there that making the newest pages more important than the old pages only makes sense. Why would you want to read an article about current economic conditions that was 3 years old? Search engines take into account how often new content is added to your website, and uses that information as well as other criteria to determine your rank.

Search engines scour the internet using programs called “spiders”. Spiders walk, or search the web to record what is out there. One of the things these spiders look for is how many links there are to a particular page. The theory being, more links make it more important. When you type in a search for something the engine looks for that search phrase and then delivers those web pages that match your search and puts the ones with links higher in the rankings.

If you wrap up these two thing as well as other criteria, this all adds up to where a search engine places your web pages in a search. So the key is to have a lot of fresh original content and have a lot of links to your website.

Whether you are an insurance agency, a retail store, or an automotive repair shop, having help forums attached to your web site does not only add refreshable content that will redirect people to your website, it adds functionality to your site that most people in small business do not have or think they can’t afford. If you develop enough momentum, it will also generate leads or customers organically.

Let’s say you are a 4X4 business that specializes in Jeep restoration. If you had help forums that addressed topics that people were interested in, you would not only get name and brand recognition from your current customer base, your site will attract non-customers (potential customers) that would find these forums useful because they either found it by doing a search or your own customers were spreading the word about it to people they know. I can’t tell you how many times I have actually used these to work on my boat or other hobbies I have. I searched a help forum about 2 months ago that actually helped me with a bilge pump problem I was having on my boat, and now I go back to these forums all the time, and have even bought items from the web site of that company. Also, there is virtually no cost to this type of advertising, and when tied to your blog, website and other social media accounts, can be a very powerful viral marketing tool!