A step above Google Analytics, the Filter and Segmentation tools will help you take your analysis to the next level. The reason being, the more you can segment your data the more you can understand your customers' behavior and the more positive actions you can take to increase your profits. A company owner who can segment his data to include how a visitor came to view your site, for example via an email marketing campaign, or a well-placed advertisement on a different site, and who can then view the percentage of those visitors who end up buying a product, will know exactly which avenue of advertising is worthwhile to invest his time and money into.

There are two complementary features offered by Google Analytics which allow you to shape your data and gain a deeper understanding of what is occurring on your site, Profile Features and Advanced Segmentation. Google Profile Filters allows you to permanently modify (screen or suppress) the data that flows into your profiles so it will be most useful to you and you won't have unnecessary data overwhelming your reports. The Advanced Segmentation feature gives you the room to define and save reports for your operation based on your own customized criteria. You can choose which factors you would like to monitor on your site like top keywords,top referrers, etc and sit back as the reports flow in. A couple of the basic Profile Filters include: Upper Lower Case Blending- There are some servers that allow the blend of uppercase and lowercase URLs. Implementing a filter for all your URLS that they should be in the same case will make your job of tracking access to different or specialized sites way easier.

Session ID Confusion- A session ID refers to the unique number given by a web server to each visitor. Many times your site URLs may unnecessarily be comprised of long session IDs which will cause faulty reports on your page visits. Profile Filters allows you to strip these IDs out.

IP Address Exclusion Filtering- An IP Exclusion Filter can successfully filter your internal traffic (caused by you and your staff) so only the traffic you care about (visitors) will be recorded.

Many times an overflow of incoming data can be very overwhelming. By putting a handle and controlling what data you receive, your job will be less daunting and much simpler. But beware, that once your filters are established you can't retrieve the lost data. It is recommended to create a couple of profiles of your domain. This allows you multiple views of all your site data. After your filters are set up, the next step will be Advanced Segmentation, which will give you a more detailed and precise report on your customers habits.

An ecommerce web site acts as a store front for window shoppers, aka your browsers. The web design of your ecommerce site is therefore of utmost importance to ensure quality customer conversions. Design your website to gently lead your client through the learning and sales process. Proper text spelling is very important. Place a lot of textual content around your site to provide for the search engine spiders and to keep your visitors accurately informed.

Abandoned shopping carts are a common ecommerce merchant nightmare. In all probability there are a couple of not so finely tuned issues causing this problem.

Many times a site will request personal information before completing a purchase. Filling out pages of information may deter people from finishing up and they may opt to leave the site altogether. Be sure that your shipping costs are clearly displayed. Customers like to to see the charges set out for them. Many times customers who can't locate the shipping fees easily may abandon the whole buying process and leave to find alternative options.

Having a slow loading shopping cart is a recipe for disaster. It is important that your shopping cart loads quickly and that any changes made to merchandise in the cart are done quickly too. If a customer is trying to add an item to their cart and your page is taking a long time to load, they may just decide to skip the purchase. make sure to insert an option for payment other than the US dollar to smooth out the process for your international customers.

Discount code features should be placed in easily recognized locations near the shopping cart. It's best if the discount will immediately register on the total because human nature is to like saving money!

Many a frustrated customer will spend time shopping around a site without completing a purchase and return an hour later to find their shopping cart empty! It is worthwhile to implement a reasonable amount of time that the merchandise will remain in the shopping carts for customers to resume their shopping and complete their purchases. Because with the busy lives we lead today it is very likely that people won't finish their ordering in one sitting. Of course we'd all rather customers who shop and purchase in one sitting but since there are occasions n which this won't happen its best to be optimally prepared to assist our customers in every way.

Before you start sending traffic to your site complete a thorough usability test of your shopping cart. This can be accomplished by having a couple of people mock shop and complete a purchase. Observe them as they navigate through all the steps without assisting them in any way. Give them a discount code to enter and see how smoothly the totals change. This way you can check if there are any bumps in the process that need to be smoothed out before you turn your visitors into frustrated browsers. By creating a a pleasant shopping cart experience you will be sure of happier and more satisfied customers.

Constant Contact was established as a user friendly affordable email marketing tool with the goal to assist small businesses in building successful customer relationships. Email marketing allows you to stay in constant touch with your customers via professional looking emails ensuring strong relationships. It is known to be more effective than regular email.

Constant Contact is an easy service to use. Simply create your email with the help of the email wizard. You can also add in pictures and graphics if you want to liven up your emails. The Email Auto Responder can schedule welcome emails and commonly sent messages.

Constant contact also boasts tools like the Anti-Spam checker that can spot possible trouble in your emails that may cause them to be redirected to the spam inbox of your reader. You will then be notified so you can make the necessary corrections. Email marketing also avoids spam filters because it allows you to be placed more accurately in your customers inboxes. An email from constant contact is less likely to be sent to the spam inbox than a regular email due to its longstanding reputation of reputable emails.

Because email newsletters are fast and inexpensive to create, you can send them out on a more constant basis than paper ones.This will cause for you to be seen by a larger audience. Additionally forwarding around an email newsletter is quite simple so your loyal customers will have no trouble sending your newsletter around to their friends. Once a reader views your newsletter and finds it interesting, they will probably add themselves to your mailing list with a simple click of the 'join our mailing list' button. Now they have successfully added themselves to your list of steady newsletter receivers and are on their way to becoming a loyal customer.

Constant contact allows you to track who reads and responds to your emails. You can see who opened your emails, who forwarded them to friends and you can even view who clicked on what links in your email. This will allow you to understand what your viewers are interested in reading about so you can customize your content accordingly. There is also a feature that allows you to schedule delivery for specific times, such as when its most likely for people to open them up.

Understandably an added benefit is saving on writing materials and postage! Constant contact was created as an affordable service and true to its goal, prices start as low as $15 a month. No printing fees, weight surcharges and definitely no postage stamps!

The first thing to work on in your SEO is locating good keyword phrases for your page. Don't try to write your whole site for one keyword phrase, rather focus on writing pages for specific keywords. You want the phrase you choose to be popular but not too popular. Usually the very popular words are very competitive. It's better for you to choose more specific keywords that can rank higher. Another great tip is to insert your keyword phrase into your domain name. If you can't put it in your domain name at least try for your URLs because search engines generally read the URLs and assign values to the associated text. Keyword density is the ratio of your keywords to the rest of the words in your text. You don't want to overuse your keywords. Average keyword density should be between 3 and 7 percent for your main keywords and just 1-2 % for any secondary key phrases.

In SEO ,content is king. The content of your site is basically what the search engines will rank you according to. Because of this it is extremely important to choose quality content. Many times a website has competitors, therefore it is imperative that besides for inserting quality content, you put in content that is is unique to your site too. You need content that will capture your reader's attention over another site. Besides for this, it is important to constantly add new content because sites that add new content on a regular basis are viewed as reliable sites. In addition the added relevant content will improve your rankings. The more content, the more you have to be indexed and appear in search engines. Following one theme or topic throughout your whole site will give more credibility to each of those pages.

Quality links and links from similar sites to yours are always beneficial. Links from domains like .edu and .gov are wonderful for your SEO because it is quite difficult to get them! So if you somehow find a way to get a link from any such domain, it ranks extremely well for your site!

Last but not least is to live long. Older pages on your site rank higher than newer ones. I guess some correlation to wine.....So try to keep yours live as long as possible.

Gone are the days when Internet access referred to a clunky computer monitor and screen. Many people now access the Internet via smart phone, Blackberrys or even regular cell phones. Because of this growing practice website designers and developers need to focus on mobile format websites too. But no need to get nervous about having to learn new software and programs, there are a couple of online services available to help you create or convert websites into mobile format.

Google's Conversion Utility's name speaks for itself. A simple program that just needs your website URL and an indication to include images or not, select the 'Go' button and your website is successfully converted to mobile format. Regardless of the fact that it's not so publicized, it's a great program.

The Mobify program is just as it sounds. Mobile modification. This is a web service that uses DeviceAtlas, the leading mobile device database, to provides an efficient way to convert a site for mobile access. Many web designers and bloggers find Mobify a wonderful program for designing visually engaging and easy to use mobile layouts for their existing websites.

Skweezer.com is another user friendly site for mobile conversions. Enter your site URL and it will display your website in its mobile friendly version. It removes any large images, CSS styles and their elements that will not display properly once converted.

MoFuse and Winksite are two really neat programs that have the ability to detect a visiting mobile user . They will then send them over your site's mobile version!

As always when designing a website, it is important to keep things simple, how much more so when assigning styles for mobile devices. Because they in general work slower than computers you want to avoid anything that will slow it down more, like large images or weighty pages. It's also a good idea to scale page elements by screen size rather than fixed pixel widths because handheld mobile devices vary in their own screen sizes and resolutions. You want your page to look top notch no matter on which screen at what time!

To frame or not to frame, that is the question. It may be tempting to use frames in your website design because you may want a clear and clean look throughout your site, like headers, footers, menu bars, etc and frames make these easy to implement. Many users also find framed sites easy to navigate around and to find information. yet many times the disadvantages associated with frames render the whole idea not worth it. If someone specifically wants to use frames they will have to create duplicate pages though with no frame-sets to accommodate browsers who don't support frames and are therefore incompatible to pages with this framework. Additionally many search engines have difficulty ranking framed pages which may result in low ranking for your site for no good reason, other than the fact that you designed your site with frames! When everyone is working so hard to better their SEO why use the number one thing that is known to hinder the spiders?

The fact that the address bar doesn't change from page to page makes it impossible for anyone to bookmark or share a link to a specific page on your site. This means that any time someone wants to return a to a specific page he would need to start searching through your whole site. Secondly, when a page from your site other than the frame-set shows up in search engine results , the visitor conducting the search will just see the sub-page without the surrounding frame. A framed site may also prevent the 'back' button on a screen from working properly. A disabled user employing the use of a screen reader may also find it difficult to navigate around such a site.

There are ways to combat these problems but the clunky javascript designed to help defeats the purpose of the frames in the first place! Instead of having your easy to use frames you are forced to play around with the javascript to combat its problems! in reality The preferred way of having the same elements on a page throughout a site is to use server-side includes. server side includes, or SSI, allow you to construct separate pages for inclusion in another 'main' page. SSI can be very effective when used together with tables. many times you may find one section of a page that you would like to appear on each page of your site. though it may seem ideal to frame it, you can achieve the same effect by using an SSI callout in a table cell within a page, and none of the problems associated with frames arise! So though frames may have their uses, it does seem fair to say that many strongly advise keeping your distance from this website format.

Many a frustrated website developer wonders what makes browsers lose interest in his site quickly. There may be a couple of causes to this problem. Here we will touch on a few.

Stop and look over the pages on your site. Does each page have something valuable to offer its visitors? Presentation of a page won't matter if there is no valuable content on it for the reader. Your visitor is browsing your site for a reason. Try to fulfill those reasons before spending time dreaming up successful designs. You need to have the basic content in place first. This will give your visitors reason to continue browsing through the rest of your site.

In addition, many sites try to make money by posting advertisements for other businesses in their sites. How many of us would bother turning on the TV if it were just commercials? In the same vein, a site developer needs to ensure that the advertisements don't take over the whole page and that there is more content than ads available. Try for a 25/75 ratio, 25% ads to a 75% site content.

Many websites use pop-ups to relay messages to their visitors. If you look from the perspective of a visitor, pop-ups are annoying and distracting, hindering attempts to complete conversion or acquire information. There are many creative ways to get messages across other than springing them in them face of the screen reader. Many times a frustrated reader will just click off a pop-up filled site without finishing his task, vowing to get what he needs from another pop-up free site.

An organized site breeds happy consumers. Ensure that your site is easily navigable and that your content is organized neatly. Besides for a generally more attractive interface, browsers will find their way around and be able to successfully accomplish what they need to on your site. This is at least as important as the overall web design of your site!

Including a menu bar and a way to return HOME on each page. The HOME icon will allow for a lost visitor to redirect himself easily. Posting a menu bar is helpful so that visitors can find their way around without having to return HOME each time they want to reread the menu or available options.

This is but a tip of the iceberg of the many ideas available to keep your browsers loyal and returning. Most of them are applicable in some way to all sites. The great thing about them is that they generally don't call for major site renovations, just a bit of tweaking here and there.

The newest trend in the world of web design is paper design. Paper design is just as it sounds, using the good old-fashioned paper and cardboard look for your website design. This lends a warmer more personal touch to a generally colder computer look. its a fun and creative way to personalize your website and add in a bit of personality.

Some sites may opt to use the notebook paper look. Its definitely a very different look than the traditional computer screen we are used to viewing. Adding in text 'written' in pencil scrawl or precise inked words is a wonderful complement to this innovative idea.

Others may try out the layered scrapbook look. This will usually involve a combination of colors or contrasts displayed in a more haphazard though eye catching way. This concept is wonderful For Camps or extra curricular programs building a website who are looking to successfully transmit over the fun they want to advertise. Browsers generally find a page with a bit more personality to be more compelling to look into further.

The clipboard or spiral look is another interesting idea. This basically involves an image of a clipboard or spirals of a notebook and the main theme of your site displayed on the 'paper' attached to the clipboard. It lends a bit of informality and camaraderie between the website designers and the site visitors. The actual design of the website has an effect on the [future] relationship between developers and customers!

Posting images, graphics, or pictures, in the Polaroid camera look is another twist on the usual ideas. For a business that wants to advertise their services, for example a paint company or mold removal service that would like to display 'before' and 'after' pictures promoting how wonderful their services are, this is a fantastic option. The real life pictures are a wonderful way to show your browsers the miracles you can perform. the space underneath the picture allows you to 'pencil' in any comments you would like, for example, 'before and after' or '3 days after and two months after,' etc. there are numerous possibilities available.

Understandably I only covered a couple of ideas because ultimately your creativity and feelings are what will shine through on the site you design. Using paper inspired design is a wonderful way to blend the physical world with the world of computers.

One of the most important facets to site optimization is optimizing your images. Images greatly enhance a site by making it more exciting and attractive to browsers. Problems can arise though because high quality images can greatly increase a page's loading time. The trick is to optimize your images so that they remain great in quality yet small in file size. In addition, image optimization is very important in SEO . There are many wonderful Internet tools available to help you best optimize your images.

Smush.it is a program dealing specifically with image formats. With its optimization techniques it removes all unnecessary bytes from your image files and improves performance. A big advantage is that it won't alter the visual quality of your image during its cleansing process. Smush.it can run through five website images at the same time! You can expect up to a twenty percent reduction of site size after 'smushing' the images on your pages.

SiteReprtCard Image optimization Tool is a free utility that is able to compress any GIF, JPG,and PNG image. Its easy to use this program. Just copy and paste your image's URL into the blank space or upload your picture onto the program and the SiteReportCard will consolidate your image into a given size or quality.

RIOT which is an abbreviation for Radical Image Optimization Tool is unique in the sense that it can optimize images with uncommon extensions. The tool is able to optimize different image formats by reading its magic number. It's a fast processing tool so you have instant results. It uses well known re-sample filters like Lanczos3, Bicubic, and others. Many people like using this tool because both the revised image and the original are displayed side by side to easily compare quality. The resulting image is a cleaner user interface.

The JPEG cleaner is a simple yet powerful implement useful for ridding JPG files from anything that is not picture data. Many popular graphics programs such as Adobe, have been writing additional heavy information into the JPG files that isn't necessary for the proper display of the image. It just makes the image much larger and slow-loading and it's not enhancing the quality at all. This tool will successfully dispose of that unnecessary information leaving your beautiful high quality image a much smaller file size.

There are numerous other tools available for you to try out on the various images in your site. You're the best judge when it comes to this. No matter what too other people vote on, you will see for yourself which tool is the very best for YOUR site optimization.