Once you get your website up and running you want to let everyone know about your website through marketing. And smart marketing and research tools can help you to get some of the basic helps for FREE. Yes, you can find some better marketing and research tools in exchange of money but why not start with FREE marketing and research tools and later once you feel comformatble you can always upgrade. I have gathered a small list  of 10 FREE marketing and research tools and/or sites that any website developer can use.   These tools are not in any perticular order:

1: Alexa toolbar : 
The Alexa toolbar gives you instant information about any website you visit. It's a downloadable "plugin" for your browser (IE or Firefox) and shows you a site's traffic, pagerank, related sites, who's linking in, and much more. 

2: Google Website Optimizer: 
Google offers this free "multivariate" and A/B testing tool to help you improve your conversion rate -- and your sales! -- by testing different versions of your site content to see which gets the best results. Google offers tips on what and how to test, so even if you're a "newbie," this tool can help you boost your site performance.

3: XML Sitemaps
This quick and easy sitemap generator helps search engine spiders find their way around your site and index it faster so you can rank better in the search results.(And for 5 bucks, this site has a broken link finder that will search up to 500 pages for you.)

4: AdWords Keyword tool
The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a free tool that provides ideas for new keywords. It also gives you graphs showing the relative number of searches to amount of competition for those keywords among AdWords advertisers. This tool is invaluable both for your niche research and for your SEO and pay-per-click efforts.

5: Optiview
Optiview is a free site analysis tool. It lets you find out what your site looks like when it loads at different speeds and checks for images that make your site load slower than it should. The faster your site loads, the better -- which is why a tool like Optiview is such a big help.

6: Quantcast
Would you like to find out who is coming to you site? It's really easy with this free tool that shows your audience's age, education gender, income and more.

7: Google Alerts
This simple tool helps you keep up with the latest news in your industry, get ideas for content, and check out your competitors. If you want to keep yourself updated then Google Alerts are a huge time saver. I love this site to find out what kind of traffic other sites are getting.

8: Blogger
Blogger is the twelfth most popular website in the WORLD. And it's the easiest way to get your own blog up and running in as little time as possible. With a blog, you can publish articles -- or any other kind of content related to your market -- and link it to your website to get higher rankings in the search engines.

9: Audacity
Audacity is a free audio recorder and editor you can use if you want to include any audio on your site. Plus, it's great for recording instant podcasts!

10: YouTube
These days, people are demanding more multimedia features on a website... and that includes video. YouTube allows you to host your videos on their site and makes it easy for you to show those videos on your site, as well. It's not just a time waster, it can help spread the word about your business

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