This page is a list of internet marketing tools and resources I have found very useful. Enjoy, most of them are free. I add new ones all the time. Check out the FREE infographic creator. It’s way down the page under the heading ‘Infographics Anyone?’
Official Google SEO Guide – From Google!
Not a lot of people know this, but Google have written an SEO guide for Webmasters, and you MUST read this now! Forget all the advice you have read elsewhere about on-page, off-page, backlinking, page-rank, tags, emphasizing text etc., this is the OFFICIAL Google guide to getting SEO right. And best of all you can download it to your Kindle or anywhere else and read at your leisure. Enjoy.
Official Google Guide To Search Engine Optimisation
Site Speed
Your site loading speed matters. Not just to impatient visitors but to search engines. A slow site will move down the results page. Here is a fabulous free tool that not only checks your site’s speed but also shows you the bottlenecks and a whole bunch more. THIS is a brilliant tool.
Keywords
If you want to find out what sort of questions are being asked about a particular subject, then I highly recommend this free tool from WordTracker:
https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions/
One of the keys to writing articles is to use related keywords throughout. Words that are related to a subject are called LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing). Here’s a free tool to grab those words and phrases:
Enter your URL (any page on your site or the root domain) and the keyword you are targeting for that page and see how you are doing for keyword relevancy:
You can force Google into making a country specific search by adding the code &gl=country to the end of the search string in your browser, where country equals us for example to get the results as though you were searching from the USA. This is useful to see what people from other countries are seeing when they enter your keywords.
Google hides 60% or more of your search keywords from you when you look at your site through Google Analytics. Here’s a great article on how to get a better idea of your data:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/unlock-keyword-not-provided/
How Does Google See Your Page?
The Google search bot sees your page differently from the way you see it in your browser. So if you want to get an idea of what it sees (andtherefore how it might think about ranking the page) you need a different way of viewing it. Here’s the tool you need. Just type in the URL of your page and it will show you the result:
http://www.seoconsult.com/seo-tools/what-google-sees.html
How Does My Site Look In Other Browsers or Mobile Devices?
Three great sites here for checking if you site works on all devices. The first will show you how it looks on different mobile devices. Just type in your URL. The second one will run it through just about every known browser, take a screenshot and let you see the lot.
http://mattkersley.com/responsive/
More Tools And Resources For Internet Marketers
There is a site that you simply must connect with. It’s called TYNT.com Sign up (there’s no cost), go through the simple wizard and grab the code it generates. Place this on all your content pages, or if you have a WordPress site, upload the Easy Tynt plugin by Scott Swezey and it automatically adds it to all pages. From now on whenever any visitors copy and paste anything from your site it will take with it a link back. That means you start getting the best types of backlinks you could ever wish for. Meaningful, varying anchor text and a very good chance of it being placed on high PR real sites and blogs. All you need now it great content!
The link is: http://www.tynt.com
SEO
Here’s an infographic view of life in the SEO World:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-essential-seo-infographics
Interested in making your site faster? If you don’t Google wont like you! So why not use their tool to see why:
https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/
And here’s another excellent tool from Google to actually test your page open speed (remember, slow sites get ranked lower):
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html
Analytics
If you do nothing else, sign up for Google Analytics and add your site to your account. Here’s Google’s brilliant tutorials to get you started:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/iq.html?
And this fantastic post from Don Crowther will help you get even more from Google Analytics:
http://www.doncrowther.com/social-media-tactics/installanalytics
Tracking Ad Campaigns With Tracking 202
Whilst SEO is the simplest option for free traffic, paid traffic is the guaranteed way to get to your audience. But the only way you are likely to make it pay is if you set up very targeted campaigns and track every part of it. Fortunately there is a brilliant piece of free software for doing this. It’s called Tracking202. You can download and install it on your server for free or get it hosted on Tracking202′s server (that option obviously will cost but it’s really good value!). Here’s the link for the free self-hosted option:
http://prosper.tracking202.com/apps/
Mobile
If you are developing a mobile version of your site (and if you’re not you should be) then here is an emulator to test it out on:
http://www.mobilephoneemulator.com/
Royalty Free Images
Adding images to your posts is good SEO. Remember to name the images and add alternative text too. Use a caption if you can. Think of the reader always. If your image is a picture of a town, make sure its filename states that.
Some of these incur a one-off fee, some are free. The free ones mostly require an a link-back in acknowledgement. Some require you to register.
http://www.freeflowerimages.com/
http://www.studio7designs.com/stock-photography/
http://www.gettyimages.com/CreativeImages/RoyaltyFree
WordPress
Here’s a great site to learn more about WordPress if you are a bit of a techy. They specialise in ensuring WP Plugins take as few resources as possible to keep your WP site going at its best. Excellent advice here.
And for an incredible list of plugins free and paid look here:
Ebook Formatters
There are many formats for ebooks, and as an internet marketer, one of the things you should consider doing is publishing. You could write an information book (or a series of them) on your chosen or expert field for example. The problem is, once you have written your book, how do you get it formatted for all the devices?
Well Calibre is the answer! Actually it is much more than that, but the important part is that it is free. Here’s the link:
And here’s another great resource on the Code.Google site. It’s called Sigil, and is also completely free. Designed for the Epub format used on the Apple iPad and many other E-Reader devices including Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony Reader and Bookeen Cybook OPUS.
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Kindle
Want to publish your latest masterpiece or expert guide (to publicise your business) on Kindle? Here’s where you need to sign up:
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin
Google Authorship Test
Sometimes when searching on Google you will see results that include a picture of the author. This makes that result stand out from the rest. To do this you need to do a number of things not least of which is add your Google+ profile URL to a meta tag in the header of your post. The html code is: <link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/123456789123456789/posts“/> (this is not an actual ID by the way!).
If you use WordPress this is really easy to do with a free plugin. There are lots of them, but I use one called Google Author Link since it has the minimum of controls. All you do is add your Google+ profile link to the two fields in the Dashboard > Users > Your Profile (Google Profile URL and Google+ fields) and set the Author to yourself in the Google Author Link settings and you are done.
To see if you have inserted the code correctly, click the following link and enter your post’s URL. If all is well your photo will appear: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Site Research
If you ever want to find similar sites to your own or your competitors, use this great free tool. Just enter in any URL and away you go. It is excellent for keyword research too.
http://www.similarsitesearch.com/
Proxy Services
If you are using a desktop tool to research traffic data that uses an API for some web service or another, then the chances are you will need to use a proxy service so that you don’t get locked out. Here is a great one. There is a free service or a one time low fee gets you lifetime access. This is a total bargain.
http://www.hidemyass.com/proxy-list/
Article Marketing
A great way to get backlinks is to use syndication. Write a great article. Publish it on a high traffic site and give people permission to use it on their site provided they cite you and your site as the source. Hey presto, great backlinks. Here’s a list of the top 50 article directories to submit to:
http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php
Press Release Sites
A vital part of any campaign is press releases. Whenever you add anything to your site, write a press release about it to announce it to the world. Then submit it to the many (and many free) PR sites on the web. And to make that even easier here’s a link to a list of them:
http://www.vitispr.com/blog/free-press-release-sites/
Podcasting
Sounds like some weird fishing term doesn’t it! Anyway, if you haven’t got into podcasting yet, why not try it out? It’s been around for years but it’s about to enter the mainstream according to all my marketing friends. Here’s a list of directories for you:
http://www.podcastingnews.com/topics/Podcast_Directory.html
Headline Generator
Stuck for a headline? This is a really fun little online tool that will generate benefits laden headlines. Use anywhere.
http://hughestech.com/headline-magician/headlines.php
HTML Colours
If you want to find out the HTML colour names you can use for elements in your web site, W3Schools.com is the place to be (in fact if you want to find out anything at all about HTML they are the goto place. Here’s the colour chart page:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp
Troubleshooting
Here’s a fantastic resource for checking your site for errors. But it also checks for keyword relevancy too:
If you have any issues with the DNS associated with a domain this is a great tool to see where the world’s servers are pointing your domain name to:
http://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/undefined
And here is the ultimate webmasters toolkit. You will love this one:
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm
WordPress Forum Plugin
If you run a WordPress site you may want to install a forum to build your audience. I recommend the BBPress plugin. I’ve seen a couple of well known sites it has been used on and it looks and works just dandy!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress/
Infographics Anyone?
Here’s a brilliant resource for creating infographics – and it’s free!
More Internet Marketing Tools and Resources
There are many other internet marketing tools and resources for people trying to make the most of their online presence, and I will continue to add them as I come across them.