The beauty of online marketing is everything is measurable. The ability to track conversions to their source and analyse data effectively is what will help to improve your online marketing campaigns. Many people believe internet advertising is a creative job; however I would argue it is more analytical. No matter what kind of internet advertising you wish to undertake there is bound to be a tool which can help.

The Best Free Internet Marketing Tools

There are many tools available to help your online marketing but arguably the most important tool and the one you should install first is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics will provide you with huge amounts of data about your website. If you want to know how many people visit your site, detailed information about where they come from and what they do when they get there Google Analytics will tell you.

Google Webmaster Tools is another free tool from Google it gives you further information about how your website performs. You can see where your site ranks in Google and how many impressions and clicks you receive for search queries your site appears for. You can also submit sitemaps and generate robots.txt files to help you prevent search engine robots accessing certain areas of your site.

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to see a lot of information that Google Analytics doesn’t show you. There is the ability to manage your sitelinks if you have them. You can also see links to your site, most linked content, most popular anchor text, most relevant keywords on your site, crawl errors and crawl stats. It is also possible to fetch your website as Googlebot and receive HTML suggestions which will help you to highlight any onsite technical errors your website has.

The next free tool is also from Google and it is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Useful for both SEO and PPC research this tool allows you to research search volumes locally and global as well as get an idea of keyword competition, seasonality and average cost per click.

The next free tool is a PageRank checker. You can use the below search tool to find out what the PageRank of a certain website is. Why would you want to check PageRank? Although PageRank does not determine where you rank in the search engines it can indicate the quality of a site. The PageRank algorithm looks at the links a website has pointing to it, so if you are looking for quality sites to get backlinks from you can use this tool to check the quality of the site.

Another free tool which can help you determine the quality of a website for attaining backlinks is Alexa. The Alexa ranking tool gives you an idea of the traffic levels of websites; the lower the Alexa score the more traffic the site receives.

The Alexa tool is good for competitor analysis and research as you can analyse the search queries used by visitors to a site and check the demographics of site visitors. Alexa can also be used to find high quality websites in a particular niche, by searching data for a keyword as opposed to a web address. This can be useful for finding sites for back links or advertising opportunities.

Getting backlinks is the hardest part of SEO. It is also the most important. Generally the more quality links you have pointing to your site the higher up the search engine rankings you will be placed. Using a back link analysis tool you can find quality links your competitors have but you don’t. There are a number of free backlink analysis tools which can help you. Backlink Watch is a good free tool; it shows the anchor text for a site’s backlinks, PageRank for the link giving site, the number of outbound links from the link giving site and will also indicate the no follow links.

If you use Firefox there are a number of plugins which incorporate some of the free tools I have mentioned above. The free tool bar from SEO Book will give you information about a sites PageRank, domain age, links to the sites domain, links to the page you are on, social media links received, competitive information, IP address search, a redirect checker, search bot view checker. You can also highlight no follow links and see whether the site is registered in dmoz, Yahoo! Directory and The Best of The Web directory.

The toolbar also has a very useful search engine rank checker which you can use to check your sites rankings in all the major search engines. Another great function this all in one free tool has is the x-ray tool which shows you header tags, internal links, external links, and gives keyword density of a page. You can also visit a number of keyword tools from within the toolbar itself. There are still more features this toolbar offers and for this reason it is my top free SEO tool.