I love things that provide me new insight and show me new perspectives.
I love tools that make my job easier.
And, I love free things.
I try a lot of new tools and toys for social media scheduling, website analytics, and distribution assistance. There is nothing better than a free trial that allows individuals to try out a cool new tool and see if it works. More than a marketing pitch, the free trial is a way to allow the company to show off their product and lure in new customers just by letting them try it. Sometimes this is the magic egg of all fancy shiny new internet tools, sometimes that saves you more time than you imagined, other times it doesn’t. But, that decision is best made after a free trial.
I help market websites. My goals are to send people to your website so that they see what you do, and ultimately buy your product or service. And whether your website was built by Idea or by someone else, there are some essential marketing aspects of a website that need to be in place first.
If people don’t enjoy your website, they won’t visit it much. If you get very few visitors to your website, then Google won’t rank your site well in search and people won’t find your site.
If you want to make sure your site is ready to be marketed, here are a few FREE tools to help you understand how to go about marketing your website and create exceptional user experience:
How Will My Page Look When Shared to Facebook?
Have you ever gone to distribute a URL to Facebook and the photo that it displays is an ad from the sidebar or half of the logo from the main page? You can fix that in your website with this Facebook Debugging Tool. Simply, enter the URL you want to scrape to see how the page’s markup appears to Facebook.
Is My Website Mobile Friendly?
Google’s mobile-friendly test will analyze a website and determine if it has a mobile friendly design. You can actually see how many of your web visitors are visiting your website from mobile through your Google Analytics, and Google has made it clear that they give you preferential treatment if your website is mobile friendly. Check out Google’s updated site ranking policy for mobile-friendly websites to learn more.
What Keywords Will Potential Clients Use To Search for Me?
Whether or not you run a Google Adwords campaigns, the Adwords keyword planner tool is still reason enough to sign up for Adwords. Sometimes we know our product/service so well, that we forget what our potential client might be searching for to get there. With your customer hat on, consider what keywords your potential client is using to search you.
Once you have a few ideas, you can use the keyword planner tool to determine what is being searched for more, what other words you might want to consider and then you can add them into your writing on your website.
To use the keyword planner tool, input a word or phrase in the ‘product or service’ field and then look at the keyword ideas section. You can see what is the more searched phrase and what has the most competition. Using phrases in your website content that are more readily searched allows you to compete better in search.
Where Can I Get Free (Quality) Stock Images?
Websites with professional photography and stunning graphics can really help grow your brand. So where do you get those stunning photos if you can’t hire a professional photographer? You know that taking images from a Google image search breaks copyrights and can get you into a heap of copyright infringement hot water. If this is news to you, there is a website dedicated to educating you on all the rules at Stock Image Copyright Law.
Besides the big guns, like Getty Images and Shutterstock, there are some great photographers out there that want to share their work and free you from stock images that look stock. Whether you use them as dummy images or you find your next creative image here, Ash Guru offers up this resource of great free stock photography. Please be respectful of each websites copyright rules and when possible, offer up a credit.
What Websites Links Back To My Website?
First of all, if you are serious about SEO and making your website perform in search, then you should be reading the Moz blog. This blog is a great resource and always jam-packed with fabulous articles. Moz offers Open Site Explorer, a free tool (which limits the amount of searches you can do unless you purchase a subscription) that Moz describes as “an extremely overpowered tool of pure coolness that can provide us with detailed link information. This information is broken up into eight sections: Inbound Links, Just Discovered Links, Top Pages, Linking Domains, Anchor Text, Compare Link Metrics, Link Opportunities and Advanced Reports.”
How Can I Edit, Debug, and Monitor Code On My Website?
If you are starting to get the hang of this coding stuff and looking for a tool to correct CSS and HTML live as you explore the website, this Firebug tool is for you. You can tweak your code and see it live, uber cool stuff.
What Next?
At Idea Marketing Group, we design websites that drive marketing results. We also do marketing for clients with existing websites. If you want to market your website better, this tools are a great place to start. If all of this seems a little deep for you, we can help. Our custom designed WordPress websites come with training, so we design and develop and then pass to you to manage yourself. Or we can do the marketing and website updating for you!