Awesome Free

One of the most critical skills when it comes to building an audience for a website is search engine optimization. For a limited time, The Awesomer Shop is offering a free eight-hour training course that covers key aspects of digital marketing with a focus on generating organic traffic and tracking your results.

Locast is a nonprofit organization that set up a platform where customers in the US can stream local broadcasts absolutely free. You can go to their website or download their apps for iOS, Android and Roku. They’re currently available in select cities only as of this writing.

Web-based applications are great, but web browsers are not built for them. That’s where Station comes in. Available for Windows and MacOS, it organizes your web apps in one place, with unified search and notifications. It already supports over 300 services.

Privatix’s free service lets you generate dummy email accounts for anonymity and security. It has apps for iOS and Android plus browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Opera. The only downside is that you have to go to their site to check your dummy inbox.

Agustin Flowalistik made a fully 3D-printed letter board that looks nearly as clean and solid as one made from off-the-shelf materials. He’s sharing his 3D models for free. The set includes four different board sizes; subscribe to his Patreon and you’ll get access to the source files.

Interested in Amazon’s personal assistant devices? The company made a website that lets you talk to its virtual assistant to see if you’ll find it useful. Just log in with your Amazon account.

Jauntful lets you make online city guides and browse user-made ones for free. It’s great for helping out visiting loved ones or planning your own trips. It can also format guides into print-friendly versions.

In the mood for live music? Check out Shubaloo, a brilliantly streamlined online directory for concerts. It lets you search by location or specific venues as well as music genres, stream artists’ tracks from YouTube and of course buy tickets.

Made by Bernhard Handler, Roadeo is a racing game with an odd twist: instead of two cars going head-to-head, it pits a car against the road it’s on. It has both versus and co-op multiplayer modes.

Album Reminder is a godsend for music junkies. Just add your favorite artists and it’ll send you an email whenever any of them comes out with a new album. You can also subscribe via RSS.

A simple game for Windows by Nicolai Troshinsky. Use the mouse to keep the UFO in your camera’s sights for as long as you can. No word if the aliens have lasers. Download it for free at GameJolt.

Mouse Jiggler is a simple program that fakes mouse input. Useful if you’re watching movies, installing software, or reading on your computer and you don’t want the screensaver to kick in.

Whether you just got a new PC or you’re looking for free and useful programs, Lifehacker’s Windows Pack 2010 has got you covered, from productivity tools to media apps.

If you never played Portal, or just forgot how much fun it was, great news. The guys at VALVe are giving the game away for free for both PC and Mac. One catch – you need to grab it by 5/24.

Check out the Desktop Wallpaper Project at art and design blog Kitsune Noir for some of the best wallpapers you’ll ever see, pre-formatted for PCs, the iPhone, PSP and even the iPad.

The U.S. Army goes mobile with the release of its own iPhone app; it’s surprisingly not FUBAR’d thanks to a nifty Fact Files area that supplies news on weapons, equipment, and vehicles.

Benson Chou revamps the classic Brand Alphabet with his own 21st-century version that includes everything from Facebook to DC Shoes; download the 11×17 poster free here.

The Company of Myself is a platform puzzler in the vein of Braid and Winterbottom that mixes time travel and cloning; we just can’t decide if it’s singly multiplayer or multiply single player.

Even a heavily-armed DC is no match for the undead hordes in this Zombie Outbreak Sim; this Google Maps mash-up lets you tweak everything from zombie speed to infection time.

It’s coin-op/cartridge goodness, minus the coins or cartridges; Atari Arcade lets you play six classic games for free, including Asteroids, Adventure, Battlezone, and Lunar Lander.

Priceline Shatner would name his own price, but you can’t beat Shatnerquake author Jeff Burk’s offer: his bizarro-cool sci-fi opus about alt-universe Shatners will be free on his website 11/17.

It’s not MacHeist 4, but the nanoBundle includes six apps worth $154 (Hordes of Orcs, Twitterific) for free; the sixth app, Mariner Write, will be released when 500k bundles are downloaded.

Making the jump from XP or Vista to Windows 7 with a clean slate? Ninite graciously provides gain without pain with a one-click install of an ever-expanding suite of must-have apps.