In college I had a good friend who was always on the hunt for a deal. He’d say he was on the lookout for something that was “free-ninety-nine.” While most good things in life don’t come for free, in the Internet marketing world there are a number of tools that won’t cost you a cent. Read on to learn more about some tools that you use for your business to get your website better results online.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. It's the most widely used website statistics service available.  There’s no software to download and you can access it just by logging into your Google account and going to google.com/analytics.

Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It also tracks display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. This is a great tool to orient yourself with how visitors find and interact with your site. Analytics is very customizable and you can even make a dashboard that displays your most important metrics at a glance.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you have a website and want it to play nice with Google, one of the easiest things you can do is submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. This free service from Google lets you submit your sitemap, fetch Google’s bots to crawl your site (you’ll feel like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia), and get a quick list of broken links on your website.

Also, if you’re interested in seeing what people are searching for to find you, Webmaster Tools is one of the quickest (and cheapest) ways to find out. Under queries you’ll find a list of searches done on Google that have brought visitors to your site.

A website owner starting out with these two services is off to a great start and will be in possession of two very robust tools without spending any money. That’s a good deal if I’ve ever heard of one.

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