4 free web marketing tools for small businesses

Small business people are notoriously choosy when it comes to buying things. This trait can be even more extreme when it comes to purchasing web-related services.

Given that web marketing is such an important process for online businesses, we've compiled a list of completely free resources which will help measure the success of your ongoing effort to propel your website up the search engine rankings.

Google Analytics

Many companies market web analytics software (which analyse all the visits made to your website). Such tools will let you know where your visitors come from, which parts of your site they visit, which keywords they used to find your site, and much more.

Rather than paying a monthly fee for online traffic analytics, Google Analytics is completely free.

After you have attached a small "tag" to your webpages, Google Analytics will give you a thorough analysis of your site traffic. If you are after more in-depth traffic reports, you will probably have to pay for it - Webtrends on Demand is a good (paid for) alternative.

Marketleap

We've used a variety of web marketing tools on Marketleap for many years now. The Link Popularity checker analyses how many other sites link back to yours - across the major search engines. Although this is not an exact science, you can track your results over time to give you a good idea of how your web marketing effort is going.

The Search Engine Saturation tool simply shows how many pages from your website have been indexed by the major search engines. Again, this is a useful benchmark for your marketing campaigns.

Google Trends

Another excellent tool from the omnipotent Google, Trends allows you to see how popular various search terms are - over time.

More interestingly, perhaps, is the ability to compare your site against your competitors to provide an overall traffic comparison. You'll need to "sign in" to compare websites, but it is worth it. One potential downside of Google Trends is that it only tracks more established sites, so you may have a wait before your new site appears.

SEOChat

Aside from its excellent SEO forums, SEO Chat also has probably the most extensive set of free web marketing tools. You can do anything from comparing the search results in Google vs. Yahoo, to optimising and analysing keywords, and even a tool which will help generate your meta tags for you.