Having great data is crucial for building a successful website. However, a new website owner may not want to pay for data in the beginning. Here are some of the best, easy-to-use and free web analytics tools:

General Analytics

There are three primary analytics platforms that provide a full spectrum of data, including referral data, traffic data, content data, search data and more.

* Google Analytics – This is the Goliath of the tracking space. Google Analytics provides just about all the data you could ever want, one hundred percent free. The downside to using Google is that a lot of people don’t feel comfortable having all their websites linked together by Google, especially if they are experimenting with unconventional back-linking techniques or other “grey” areas of marketing.

* GoingUp – GoingUp provides just about everything Google Analytics does, and a little more. GoingUp also provides heatmap tracking in addition to the typical analytics data, meaning you can actually see where people are clicking on a graphical display. This can give you a lot of useful information about the behavior of your users.

* Piwik – Piwik is an open source self-hosted tracking solution. If you prefer to have your tracking hosted on your own servers rather than risk having it on someone else’s server, Piwik can be a great way to do it. They have a strong reputation for building great software, the code is written by hundreds of dedicated developers all over the world, and their platform provides all the functionality that Google Analytics does.

ConceptFeedback.com

If you want to know what people think of your design before you launch, you could post it to a group of marketers and designers for review. ConceptFeedback.com is a free website where people can post their business, marketing and design concepts to be reviewed by their peers free of charge. It’s a great way to get a gauge of what experienced designers and marketers think before you launch.

Compete.com

Compete.com is a competitive research platform that allows you to spy on your competitor’s keywords and traffic statistics. Though their data isn’t “accurate” per se, it can still give you a very good gauge on where their traffic is coming from, as well as what kinds of keywords are working for them.

Though you do need to pay to get complete access to Compete, the free version gives you a limited number of keywords and traffic sources, enough to get a very good sense of what your competitors are up to.

These are some of the top free web analytics tools available to webmasters today. Most of these tools are easy to use and can provide you with data that will make running your business much more easily.

Although they have not yet officially released a paid Twitter account, Twitter’s founder has confirmed that they are planning to release such an account with advanced features. These features are optional, but will give a person or business who uses Twitter a leg up on their competitors. What are some of the top Twitter features that are worth paying for?

Scheduled Tweets

Let’s say you have a product launch and need to send out updates every two hours. It’s quite a bit of hassle to have to log on every two hours to post a new tweet. Instead, being able to schedule your tweets ahead of time is one of the most requested features for Twitter.

Analytics

How many people have seen your Facebook page? What percentage of people is turning into followers?

When you post a link on your Twitter, how many people actually click on the link? How many people saw it? For the average user, the answers to these questions aren’t important. For a business owner, however, they’re crucial. Currently you can get some of this data by using a redirect for your link, but having analytics on your Twitter account is certainly a feature worth paying for.

Multiple User Accounts

If you run a business with several employees and want to give all your employees the ability to tweet, without necessarily giving administrative privileges to all employees is another common feature request for business accounts.

Longer Tweets

Since Twitter allows tweets to be no longer than 140 characters, it is sometimes difficult trying to condense a long tweet into fewer words.  A new feature that many will consider worth paying for is slightly longer tweets.

No Restrictions on API for Applications

If you have an application that allows you to read your Twitter feed and interact with your Twitter account, it does so through what is called API calls, which are commands and data that go back and forth between a Twitter application and Twitter.

A basic Twitter account has a limited number of API calls per hour, and if you go over the limit, you simply can’t use your application until the hour is up. This could be problematic for a business account, especially if you’re an advanced user. That’s also true of applications that use Twitter to mine data. The limited API makes it difficult to gather a lot of data at once. Having unlimited API access is a Twitter feature that advanced business users would be glad to pay for.

These are some of the many top Twitter features that are worth paying for. Although Twitter hasn’t released many details yet, it is suspected that there will be two levels of paid accounts: A lower tier level with of about $20 monthly targeted at power users and small businesses, and an upper tier level in the hundreds of dollars monthly targeted at corporations and larger businesses.

As a website owner, the development and management of your content is perhaps your single most important task. Content is what any online business is built on. It markets, drives traffic, sells, and establishes your credibility, authority and brand. Content is the key to your success. Here are five ideas to help you develop and manage website content effectively:

1. Keyword suggestion tools – You probably used keyword suggestion tools to choose your niche and position your business. However, keywords suggestion tools are great tools to help you also develop your content. Keywords change over time and keyword suggestion tools can help you stay abreast of trends and change in demand.

As you create your content plan for the week, month or quarter, use keyword suggestion tools to help you develop content topics. One good hour with a keyword suggestion tool can give you enough content topics to write about for the next month.

2. Analytics – Analytics can be one of your most useful content tools. Your analytic data can tell you:

• What keywords people are using to find your website
• What topics are most popular and most often read
• What topics are most often commented on
• What path your visitors take when they arrive at your website
• How long visitors stay on any given piece of content
• What content people most often link to.

All of this information is extremely valuable. The topics that are the most popular and heavily trafficked are gold mines. You can and should write more content on these popular topics.

3. Logical organization – Have categories that fit your keywords. When it comes to content management, logic is often forgotten. The key to making your website both user and search engine friendly is to create a logical hierarchy of content. Ideally, your primary keywords should be your primary content categories. In that way visitors, can quickly find what they came for. Your secondary categories can then be supporting content pieces.

4. Plan ahead – How many times have you sat down at your desk and thought you had no idea what to write about? Plan your content well in advance. Plan it to support your product launches, special promotions, seasonal shopping and other content. When you plan your content for the next three to six months, you’ll never be at a loss for a topic. Additionally, all of your content will serve a purpose and support a goal.

5. Repurpose content – Take advantage of the content you’ve already written. Use reports to create articles and blog posts. Rewrite articles for article marketing and newsletter content. Repackage articles into reports. Subdivide e-books into reports and so on. A little polish and revision can offer new value to readers. It can also help you grow and market your business.

Content development and management takes a plan. Evaluate your existing and future content. Make sure your navigation and organization make sense for your visitors and the search engines. Make sure your content supports your business goals and offers value. Content is essential for a successful website and online business. Maximize your efforts for a better return on investment.

Here is a handy podcast on the latest on WordPress and Google Analytics. WordPress and Google Analytics Podcast

Web maintenance isn’t something a lot of online entrepreneurs think about. In fact it can be quite a mundane task for most. However, it is important to keep your website ticking over smoothly.

Here are a few reasons why maintaining your website is important:

Attracting the search engines

Search engines are important to the livelihood of your online business, but they don’t like idea websites. Websites, which have been left static without updates or fresh content, are a no-no in the online world. Another thing search engines don’t like is broken links. As you build your web pages its easy to miss broken links. A good strategy is to double check every link you add to your website. Inevitably you may miss some or some may become broken with time (as web addresses change and so on).

Regular maintenance and checkups for your website will help you spot these broken links and keep your customers and search engines happy in the process.

Updating information may increase your sales

Regularly looking over your website will also help you make changes and adjustments as necessary. For example, you may have started promoting what was a great product two years ago but now that product may be outdated and not so great anymore. By updating your website you may find products and promotions which are a better match for your visitors.  Look through your old web pages to see if there are any promotions, which can be updated or given a little extra oomph’s. Times change and on the Internet time moves at a faster speed, “keeping up with the times” is important and you can do this by simply looking over your pages and tweaking as you go along.

Keeping track of your stats is important; another part of your basic web maintenance is keeping on top of all your visitor statistics. It makes sense to regularly go through your website and check how many visitors you have on a monthly basis, where they’re coming from, how they’re finding you, what pages they’re accessing and so on.A running log of these statistics will help you quickly identify any potential problems such as loss of traffic or reduced income from sources such as Google Ad Sense and so on.

Regular web maintenance for your website is important. It can help you keep up with changing times, help to attract more visitors and ultimately make you more sales. If you find this task difficult to squeeze in, try scheduling it in for a set time each month or every few weeks. It shouldn’t take long and the time investment may make all the difference to your business. And finally, if you don’t have time to do the web maintenance yourself you can always think about hiring an assistant to help you with this task.