ReadWriteWeb

With all the attention focused on Facebook and Google, it's sometimes easy to forget how many people visit Yahoo on a typical day. The site has over 700 million users and gets a massive amount of page views each day. As the company struggles to figure out what its future focus should be, one thing they've prioritized highly is content.

Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.

The speed at which a Website loads is paramount to maintaining a positive user experience and, as we learned last year, has a direct impact on the site's organic search rankings on Google.

The search giant's recent beta launch of its Page Speed Service gives us the latest in a long line of products and tools designed to help site owners boost page load speed. In what is by no means a comprehensive list, we've outlined a few such tools worth checking out.

For online marketers and other content creators, the need to optimize one's content for search and social media is now well-known. What's less clear for many is how to go about it. Which keywords are best to use? How frequently should you use them?

It was with these questions in mind that Eightfold Logic created InboundWriter, a new social writing Web app that analyzes the keywords in a given block of written copy and provides feedback about how to more effectively optimize that content for search and social.

Sure, your company's website could be improved. But with time and resources in such short supply, how do businesses know where to focus their energy? One answer is A/B testing, or the practice of publishing two variations of a Web page and measuring which one performs better.

A/B testing has been used by large enterprises for years. Amazon uses it to optimize product listing pages. Google was once criticized by an outgoing designer for relying too heavily on data-driven methods like this.

Testing your website is crucial, but far too often, it simply doesn't happen. The reasons can include cost, convenience, tech resources - you name it. But a company onstage today at LAUNCH wants to take away those excuses and make website testing - and, of course, website optimization - incredibly easy.

Overstat has a number of competitors in the optimization space, including the Y Combinator alum Optimizely. But Overstat's presentation today at LAUNCH made it look like it had a simple installation (just some JavaScript) and interface for both identifying problems and making updates.

Everybody knows that having a fast Website is important, especially now that Google officially factors a site's load time into its search ranking score.

It's simple enough to run a site speed test with Yahoo's YSlow plugin or Google's Web Accelerator, but how actionable the resulting reports are depends on how your Website was built and more importantly, what kind of development resources you have at your disposal.

The Velocity conference took place earlier this year - and some of the best and brightest in Web performance assembled in Santa Clara to chart a course of innovation in performance and operations for the next year.

One of the obvious themes this year was mobile, but it was the overarching mission of the conference that struck the truest chord: to take a more holistic view of the performance landscape, the 50,000-foot view, and think about it in a way that accounted for the relative complexity of a given operational environment, one that is now marked by "anywhere access" on a compendium of devices and platforms - mobile or otherwise.

The best way to reduce bounce rates and design a path of least resistance for members and customers is to offer something they want. While others prioritize member acquisition in order to build an early product test case, Sean Ellis has a slightly different philosophy. Ellis has worked with companies like LogMeIn and Xobni to produce scalable marketing programs. Before tweaking design and funnel optimization, Ellis takes pride in the fact that his successes have been built on establishing a core value to users.

Google Website Optimizer, a powerful tool that allows website owners to split traffic and test the effectiveness and conversion rates for an array of variables, has traditionally required a lot of back-and-forth between any given site and the Website Optimizer interface.

With the release of a new API, announced today, Google is allowing site owners to conduct multivariate and A/B testing from their own platforms. Part of Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a free tool that "handles splitting a website's traffic, serving different variations and crunching the numbers to find statistical significance." For site owners, these minute variations can widen conversion funnels and lead to exponentially greater engagement and profit if changes are executed correctly.

ContextSense is a newly launched sentiment extraction technology from Wingify, a company focused on website optimization solutions. As a part of their core product which helps website owners identify visitor demographics and behavior, target ads, and optimize landing pages, ContextSense demonstrates how Wingify's contextual targeting technology works. To use the tool, you simply enter in a URL or a piece of text, and it will then reveal the overall sentiment of the website (positive or negative), relevant tags, concepts, categories, and contextually similar links. The end result is a quick glimpse into what a site is all about.