If you're at all interested in investing and the stock market, then the odds are pretty good that you've made use of website stock tickers in one form or another at some point.

MakeUseOf has always offered solutions to financially savvy geeks, such as Kaly's 15 cool tools to track expenses and budget, but if you have a financial blog or website of your own, now you can embed free website stock tickers into your site with very little effort.

Thanks to the wonderful Web 2.0 world of widgets, there are a number of quick and easy tools to integrate real-time stock information on your site. If you can copy and paste, then you can have updated stock information on your website.

How to Use Free Website Stock Tickers

When selecting the best stock ticker widgets, I searched for those that are versatile enough to work on any blog platform or website. The stock widgets listed below are not only universal (most of them utilize Javascript), but they're easy to customize for the exact stocks that you want to display on your website. These particular widgets aren't just a standard stock ticker with just scrolling text, these all display stock data in a more graphical real-time format.  Just review the following list, select your favorite and embed it on your own site!

FreeStockCharts are Interactive and Free - It Doesn't Get Much Better Than That

One of the best free stock charting widgets comes from FreeStockCharts, which actually lets you choose between one of two formats. You can either use the standard graphical chart that streams the data for the stocks that you specify, or you can use the "Hover Chart," which automatically locates the ticker symbols in your content and provides your visitors with the ability to hover the mouse over those symbols and see a real-time chart of that stock. That's a very cool feature to have on any financial website.

Once you choose whichever chart you want, you can customize it to suit your needs. Customizing only requires filling out a very simple one-page form where you can select the ticker symbol, update time, colors and other features for the chart.

Once you've finished customizing all of the chart features, all you have to do is copy the code that's automatically generated at the bottom of the screen and paste it into your website or blog platform where appropriate. For my example, I'm going to embed the chart into my Wordpress blog FreeWritingCenter, which is just a matter of pasting the code into the Wordpress widgets section. After you're done, the finished real-time chart will appear on your blog or website as shown below.

The NASDAQ Market Ticker

No list of free website stock tickers would be complete without an honorary mention of the one offered by NASDAQ. This graphical ticker will actually work either on your computer desktop or on your web page. Once you click the "copy me" button on the widget page, you can choose from a list of services where you want to embed the widget. This lets the application customize the code to work best on your Blogger account, Facebook page or anywhere else. In my case, I just want the straight HTML embed code.

Once you have copied and pasted the code into your blog - you're good to go. Unlike FreeStockCharts, you don't have to sign up with your email address before you can use the ticker. Personally, I like the look and feel of the NASDAQ ticker better than most of the others.

With this ticker, your visitors can actually customize it to their own liking. If they click on "ADD," they can enter their preferred ticker symbol and that stock will show up under the "My Stocks" tab. Now that's coolness.

The Yahoo Stock Ticker - For Financial Yahooligans

Yahoo Finance is one of the most popular online financial resources on the net today, so it stands to reason that Yahoo would offer their own free stock ticker. Yahoo lets you choose from three types of modules for your site - large (quotes, charts and news), medium (quotes and charts), or small (quotes). You can customize the data with up to 10 ticker symbols, adjusting the width of the display, and choosing the color scheme.

Just like the NASDAQ ticker, you don't have to enter your email, you only have to accept the terms and conditions to get access to the code. Usually I don't really like Yahoo products because they're typically kind of "plain vanilla," with very few features. However, in the case of this stock module, the ability to customize it with up to 10 ticker symbols and choose from a variety of color schemes is very cool.

SaneBull Displays Data From Global Markets

SaneBull, briefly reviewed before by Makeuseof, offers a whole range of awesome plugins for Facebook, iPhone, Mac and many other platforms. One of the best ones is the "World Market Watch" widget, where you can display stocks from markets all over the globe on your website.  Like the NASDAQ widget, there are automatic installers for platforms like Blogger, Facebook and a variety of others.

If you do use any of these social networks, I highly suggest using this tool, especially if you're not the type that likes to play around with adding the code yourself. However, I'm old fashioned - so I always go for the copy and paste approach. I'm weird like that.

I like the look and feel of the Sanebull stock widget - however if you don't, then you're out of luck because there's no way to customize the widget. You get what you get. The extent to customization is that you can select only American, Asian or European markets instead of displaying them all at once.

Using StockTwits for Stock Tips

While not technically a stock ticker widget, StockTwits is a very useful stock widget for financial bloggers. Want to give your readers access to the latest stock tips? The StockTwits widget is a direct plugin to Twitter feeds of market investors. As investors "twit" personal stock tips, the StockTwits widget automatically updates the feed on your web page.

The major drawback with this particular stock widget is that you can't customize it - not only in terms of its appearance, but also what information comes through. The feed is basically about any stock tip whatsoever, so expect to get a stream of random tips on any stock imaginable. Of course, for day traders or other folks who are always on the lookout for hot stock tips, that's a great thing.

Do you use any stock widgets on your own website or blog? What are your favorites? Share them in the comments section below.