If you are starting on online business or blog today you have only a few ways to get the word out

1. A huge expensive advertising campaign.  Most effective, few can afford…
2. Social Media.  Use Digg, Twitter and every other social media forum to talk about your product or service.  Effective, but selling (shilling) on these sites often yields kickback.
3. Search - 90% Google and the rest of the search world.

For most businesses search is the best way to go. Even if you use advertising or social media - search is a complement to those medium.  So you are a business person starting a blog or an Internet store need to know about search and related to this you need to know what your competitors are doing in search.  Fortunately, there are a ton of tools to help you out and here is our list of 5 free (or at least free for awhile) search tools you should use:

1. Google Keyword Tool - The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns. The tool goes one step further by tailoring the keywords and other data (such as the amount of competition for the keyword, the suggested bid, and more) based on your language or country/territory settings.
2. Google Trends - With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
3. Advanced Web Ranking - Track search engine ranking positions.  Knowing your position in the search engines is one of the most important factors that can affect your online business. Whether you own a website or you are in the SEO business, Advanced Web Ranking is the most efficient tool for measuring your success. This is only free for 30 days.  There is a 30 day free trial, but after that you will have to pay.  But you will get what you pay for with this tool and I suspect many of you will buy this at the end of 30 days.
4. WordTracker: An excellent keyword research tool. Again, it is a paid service - but you can try it out for 7 days.  For a new business, you will gain a lot of knowledge in 7 days. People use different words when they search for your products online. Use these ‘keywords’ in your website copy and people will find your site when they search.No matter what business you are in, Wordtracker will tell you the words people use when they search - and how popular each word is.
5. Google Webmaster Central - Detect crawl errors and checking pages with external links.  Welcome to your one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.

You might notice 3 of these 5 are from Google. Well, Google is the overwhelming majority of the search business and they offer the most number of free tools.  There are many other tools - but these will really help out with a new blog or website!

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