Why you should care. Citations are mentions of your business in local (and other) directories. They may also provide backlinks to your web page. Citations are an important factor in your ranking on Google Places (Maps.)

website citation builder

Along with testimonials, citations are a major factor in how well you rank on Google Places (Maps). Whitespark offers a free citation finder. Not all of the results will be useful to you, but many will be. They offer a free and paid version. I’m not sure of all the differences between the two, but with the free version you will wait a day or two for Whitespark to email you a link to your results. It’s a handy tool!

Website: Free Local Citation Finder
Free Local Citation Finder (Whitespark) – STARTER VIDEO
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Why you should care. eBay Classified is now available in 272 regions across the United States. According to eBay it has received over 1 billion page views and gets millions of unique visitors each month.

eBay classified is not just for selling personal items. Local sellers of goods and services are also welcome to create free ads. Major categories include: For Sale (things), Pets, Cars & Vehicles, Community, Jobs, Resumes and Services. Under “Services” all types of local service businesses from lawyers to retailers can list their business.

Website: eBay Classified
Free Classified Ads (eBay) – STARTER VIDEO
Free Classified Ads (eBay) – SLIDE PRESENTATION
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Why you should care. Unfortunately, stealing website content is easy to do. If someone else is using your content it may affect your status with search engine placement since they check for duplicate content.

You put a lot of work into your website and the content you create. Why let someone else hijack it?

Copyscape offers a free plagiarism checker which lets you instantly discover if someone has copied your content. The site also offers links to online resources that provide advice on what you can do when your content has been stolen.

Website: Copyscape
Free Plagiarism Checker (Copyscape) – STARTER VIDEO
Free Plagiarism Checker (Copyscape) – SLIDE PRESENTATION
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Why you should care. You may think you know how your customers and prospects feel, but do you? Feedback will help you tweak your Internet marketing focus and tools so that you can improve performance.

SurveyMonkey™ offers an easy way to craft online questionnaires, distribute them and analyze results. Most of the work is done for you.

They have many template options for the look of your survey. Every type of question format (example: multiple choice) is offered. You can select how you’d like to distribute your survey, including uploading a list, adding the survey to a website or adding it to a Facebook page.

They offer both free and paid versions.

Website: SurveyMonkey
SURVEYS ONLINE (SurveyMonkey) – STARTER VIDEO
SURVEYS ONLINE (SurveyMonkey) – SLIDE PRESENTATION
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Why you should care. Internet marketers worry a great deal about how much traffic they can lure to their websites. But just as important is how many of those visitors take the desired action when they visit. This report provides some valuable insights into how to improve your landing page conversion rate.

Landing page conversion is an area that can reap huge rewards for advertisers. For example, if you can convert 10% of your visitors into callers instead of 5%, you’ve just doubled your return with the same traffic generation budget. It’s worth learning more about how simple changes to your landing pages can impact conversion.

Marketing Experiments was “the first internet based research lab to conduct experiments in optimizing sales and marketing processes.” What sets them apart from so many resources is that they base their conclusions on actual studies they perform.

Website: Landing Page Conversion
LANDING PAGE CONVERSION (Marketing Experiments) – STARTER VIDEO
LANDING PAGE CONVERSION (Marketing Experiments) – SLIDE PRESENTATION
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Why you should care. This little test of how “customer focused” your website content is serves to remind us that our prospects are interested in themselves and how they’ll benefit from what you’re selling. They are more interested in their “wewe” than yours.

Does your website focus too much on “WeWe” and not enough on “YouYou?” This free analytical tool from FutureNow counts you-focused words on your website and compares them to the number of customer-focused phrases.

You can also enter text, ad copy or sales letter copy you’ve written to monitor the you-orientation of your ads or literature.

Happily, as you can see in the Starter Video, our own InternetMarketingToolsDepot.com website had 39 times as many “you-oriented phrases” as “we-oriented phrases.”

Website: Customer Focus Calculator
CUSTOMER FOCUS CALCULATOR (FutureNow) – STARTER VIDEO
CUSTOMER FOCUS CALCULATOR SLIDE PRESENTATION
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Why you should care. Squidoo is a website where you can build your own webpages. Squidoo is one of the most popular sites in the United States (over 1 million visits a day). So Squidoo is a great way to build awareness and traffic to your business. The pages you build can include a link back to your website.

Squidoo is free and it is very easy to get started (See Starter Video). You’ll need to create an account and log in. Then you select the subject of your web page (called a Lens on Squidoo) and add tags or keywords. Before you add keywords do some research to see which keywords are most popular among your target audience.

You can add photos and videos and link back to your social marketing pages.

Best yet, you can  build as many Squidoo web pages as you want! You don’t need to buy a domain name or purchase a hosting account. Squidoo hosts your page for you.

Website: Squidoo
BUILD FREE WEB PAGES (Squidoo) – STARTER VIDEO
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Why should you care? Your comments on blogs with high relevancy to your business can be a great place to create backlinks to your website. Relevant backlinks help you build your “natural” page position on search engine results.

Blogs that utilized a comment plugin named Disqus often permit “dofollow links”. In other words, along with your comments you can leave an active link back to your web page.

Rank4 provides a free tool to uncover a long list of such blogs. You enter a keyword and up pops a list of URLs (see Blog Link Finder Starter Video).  You copy a URL and paste it into your browser. You’ll arrive at a blog relevant to your keyword that permits comments and often links back to your site.

Website: Rank4
BLOG LINK FINDER (RANK4) – STARTER VIDEO
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Why you should care. Press releases can be powerful tools to attract attention to your products and services. They can also be a way to create quality, relevant links to your web pages which is important to improve your page position on search engines.

I stumbled across this tutorial a couple of years ago and found it to be a terrific, fairly-detailed tutorial on how to prepare and send out press releases. The author offers several paid and free press release distributors and tell you how to submit releases to them.

She includes tips on optimizing your press releases so that search engines recognize them. This tutorial is 54-pages long. If you’re not experience with press releases, you could do a lot worse than starting with this slide presentation. It’s found on Slideshare.

Website: SEO Press Release Tutorial
SEO PRESS RELEASES (TUTORIAL) – STARTER VIDEO
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Why should you care? Here’s how “GetListed.org” explains it: “Claiming your listings gives you control over how the search engines index you and prevents spammers from hijacking them. It may also improve your search engine rankings and bring you more traffic.”

GetListed.org makes it easy to see how well you’re doing and move on to get the job done. You enter the name of your business and your zip code and see you are taking advantage of free listings on several major search engines and directories.

• You get a listing score of between zero and 100%

• Publishers checked include: Google, Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, Best of the Web and Hotfrog

• Listings are free. Paid versions are available

This page also links to a resource center with local marketing tips, news and tips for improving your ranking.

Website: Get Listed
CLAIM YOUR BUSINESS LISTINGS (GETLISTED) – STARTER VIDEO
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