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Christmas 2006 - Three Free Gifts...

Season's Greetings and all that. As the Festive period can prove to be a little wearing on the bank balance to say the least, this month I thought I'd tell you about some tools that you'll find useful for your business's website.and they're all free!

First up, how many other websites are linking to yours, and what sites are they? This is very useful to know, as search engines such as Google place a lot of importance on who links to your site. If a website in your industry, that Google deems important, links to yours, Google could place more importance on your site, and boost your ranking. Many other factors are considered as well, but 'link popularity' is very important. Step forward linkpopularity.com. Just enter your website address, and within seconds you'll see how many sites listed on Google, MSN and Yahoo link to yours - the results can be quite an eye-opener.

Speaking of Google, they offer an incredibly useful tool that allows you to analyse who is visiting your website. By inserting a small piece of code on each page that you want to track, you will start building up a picture of where people are coming in from geographically, how they move around your site, how long they look at page, and so on and on.

It's easy to use, and if you run an Adwords campaign, you can link it in with that to get valuable information on just how well it's performing. To set up a Google Analytics account, you need to have a Google Mail account. These are free as well, but you can't just go to Google and sign up for one - you have to be invited by someone who already has an account. I still have some invitations left, so if you'd like one, just get in touch , and I'll get it sorted, but remember - it's first come, first served.

My final freebie will help you gather feedback directly from your customers. Survey Monkey allows you to create online surveys quickly and easily. The free version allows you to set up 10 questions and gather 100 responses. If you want more that that, then there is a subscription version as well.

Survey results are displayed as raw statistics and as graphs, which you can import into Excel, and you can also ask "Any comments?" style questions, inviting users to give text responses. Set up as many surveys as you like, but remember that you're asking people to invest their time to fill it in, so think about making it worth their while by offering an incentive.

So, there you have it - three free tools, which I'm sure you'll find very useful.

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