Internet market research tool

To move into a specified market, you will need to firstly do a certain amount of investigations. Internet is an information ocean, in which a lot of things are provided, the useful, the junks. You have to classify them and sort them and throw away the nonsense.

Below are some of the tools I use for internet market investigation and research. They are useful and they are Free!

Google Keyword suggestion tool. This is more useful if you are going to SEO your site for Google results. And what interests me is that it also provide an estimated monthly search volume, which helps you to decide which keywords are right for you.

Google Trends. This tool tells you how the keyword you chose was going in the past time. And you can find the hot ones in there.

Google Webmaster tool. Some may say this is not a market research tool. But I say, knowing yourself is also a research.

Alexa. This is absolutely useful when you are evaluating a site's traffic. This may not be 100% accurate but it means something. And I believe this tool will be more powerful in the future.

Page Rank checker. This tool checks the site's page rank.

Whois. This is a very useful tool that tells you the IP address, the server location, the estimated traffic (different from Alexa), and the traffic resource, etc. You will be delighted to find more.

Quantcast. It tells you traffic details such as visitors' gender, income, education, etc. Very useful for your SEM.

Compete. An online tool that helps you to identify the traffic status of a site. It also record the keywords that drive traffic to the inquired site.

All these tools can be integrated into Mozilla Firefox.

Hope they are also useful for you. Enjoy!