Since the last few posts have been about free things, I thought I’d put up a post about more free things, after all free is my favorite flavor. I’m not going to talk about the typical free SEM tools, as that’s been done to death* (i.e. Google Webmaster tools, Microsoft AdLabs Tools, Keyword Research tools, Analytics Tools, etc). Instead I’m going to write about 3 of the other side resources that you may want to use for your site.

Favicon.ico

Want to create a pretty little icon to display on the browser tab? If you have a picture, or an image of a corporate logo, you can simply go to Favicon from Pics and very quickly generate a favicon.ico file. Once you have that, just put it in the root directory of your site, and everyone will start to see that icon when they visit your site. Don’t have a logo? Prefer to create your own custom doodle? No problem, just go to the favicon.ico generator, and draw your icon, pixel by pixel.

Images

As I mentioned the other day in my post on everystockphoto.com, I typically use sites such as Stock Xchng for copyright free images, but there are plenty of sites out there for free images such as imageafter, and everystockphoto does work rather well as a meta image search engine.

Local Data

If you want to do something that involves local business data, there are many paid options out there, but there’s also a free resource - iBegin.com. They pull their data from a “variety of different telcos“, and give it out free for non-commercial use. They have millions of businesses listed across the US, you can drill down by state, or even down to the city level. You can then tie this data in with other free resources such as maps, to create your own mashups.

*nb: This doesn’t mean that at some later date, I won’t come back and flog the expired equine of free SEM tools some more