Free Internet Marketing Articles

10 Great FREE Tools to Help Tune Your Website

At IMC, we’re always getting requests from people who want specific tools to help build their own Internet business. The tools cover niche research, competitor intelligence, video, blogging and the list goes on.

The great news is, there are tons of free tools available online!

Here are some of our favorites, in no particular order:

Cool Free Tool #1: Alexa toolbar
http://www.alexa.com/site/download/

The Alexa toolbar gives you instant information about any website you visit.

It’s a downloadable “plugin” for your browser (IE or Firefox) and shows you a site’s traffic, pagerank, related sites, who’s linking in, and much more.

It’s one of our “must-have” research tools!

Cool Free Tool #2: Google Website Optimizer
http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Google offers this free “multivariate” and A/B testing tool to help you improve your conversion rate — and your sales! — by testing different versions of your site content to see which gets the best results.

Google offers tips on what and how to test, so even if you’re a “newbie,” this tool can help you boost your site performance.

Cool Free Tool #3: XML Sitemaps
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

This quick and easy sitemap generator helps search engine spiders find their way around your site and index it faster so you can rank better in the search results.

(And for 5 bucks, this site has a broken link finder that will search up to 500 pages for you.)

Cool Free Tool #4: AdWords Keyword tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a free tool that provides ideas for new keywords. It also gives you graphs showing the relative number of searches to amount of competition for those keywords among AdWords advertisers.

This tool is invaluable both for your niche research and for your SEO and pay-per-click efforts.

Cool Free Tool #5: Optiview
http://www.optiview.com/

Optiview is a free site analysis tool. It lets you find out what your site looks like when it loads at different speeds and checks for images that make your site load slower than it should.

The faster your site loads, the better — which is why a tool like Optiview is such a big help.

Cool Free Tool #6: Quantcast
http://www.quantcast.com/

Would you like to find out who is coming to you site? It’s really easy with this free tool that shows your audience’s age, education gender, income and more.

Cool Free Tool #7: Google Alerts
www.google.com/alerts

This simple tool helps you keep up with the latest news in your industry, get ideas for content, and check out your competitors.

When it comes to research, Google Alerts are a huge time saver!

Cool Free Tool #8: Blogger
www.blogger.com

Blogger is the twelfth most popular website in the WORLD. And it’s the easiest way to get your own blog up and running in as little time as possible.

With a blog, you can publish articles — or any other kind of content related to your market — and link it to your website to get higher rankings in the search engines!

Cool Free Tool #9: Audacity

http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Audacity is a free audio recorder and editor you can use if you want to include any audio on your site. Plus, it’s great for recording instant podcasts!

Cool Free Tool #10: YouTube
www.youtube.com

These days, people are demanding more multimedia features on a website… and that includes video.

YouTube allows you to host your videos on their site and makes it easy for you to show those videos on your site, as well. It’s not just a time waster, it can help spread the word about your business!

… So those are 10 of our favorite free tools.

(This was supposed to be a list of 7, but I like all these tools so much, I couldn’t leave out a single one!)

Happy business building!

By Derek Gehl