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There’s a ton of free online tools available at the disposal of website owners. I can’t go through them all in one blog post as I’ll be here forever but wanted to give you a few to get you started. No doubt I’ll be covering more in future blog posts.
So without further ado, here’s a pick of the best ones:
1. Google Analytics
If you’re not tracking visitors to your website, then you should be and you need to start doing this today. There’s a huge variation in the quality of various website tracking software, but one of the best free ones is Google Analytics. It’s easy to set up, just ask your web developer to add some code to each of your web pages and away you go. One of the best things I like about Google analytics is that you can set up goals to track when a visitor completes a form, or purchases from your website and find out where they came from, which keyword they typed into a search engine. Not only do you know where your visitors came from, but where those that converted came from too!
2. Google Adwords keyword research tool
The Google Adwords keyword research tool is a great way of finding out which keywords are the best ones to target for your SEO campaigns as well as any pay per click advertising you may want to do. You’ll be amazed at the list of keywords that are suggested and it can be quite overwhelming, however, it really makes you think about the different ways people search. You’ll get plenty of ideas and won’t be short of finding brand new keywords that you could also use to create new content for your website.
3. Yahoo Site Explorer
Yahoo site explorer not only tells you which pages of your website it has indexed and placed in its database, but which links are pointing to your website from other websites. It’s the best tool to publicly view incoming links to a website (Google doesn’t show publicly all links that it records pointing to a website). Therefore, this is a great way of finding sites that may be suitable to gain links from. You can input your competitors’ websites too and find a whole list of sites that may be worth targeting as they’re already linking to your competitor.
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
