8 Key Tips for Building Successful Website

1. Content (Useful, informative, free, and easy to understand)

If you offer well written, original, easy to understand information, spiced up with good imagery, the chances of getting quality links, social media exposure and high spots in SERPs are bigger. The whole point of the Internet is finding useful, relevant, free information. Everything is about information. If you’re able to convey it in a manner that stands out from the crowd you’re automatically step ahead from the others in the pool.

2. Basic SEO

I vouch for the fact that you don’t have to be a SEO expert to rank your site high on Google search. Just several things to remember here:

• include meta title tags,
• optimal and natural usage of keywords,
• provide good link bait article titles,
• simple navigation through out the site,
• proper usage of H1, H2 and H3 tags,
• include sitemap,
• use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to gain insight on what works and what’s not,
• use robots.txt file,
• proper permalink structure,
• avoid duplicate content (CMS issue),
• use canonical tags.
• read the Google SEO Starter Guide (PDF).

3. Design

You want more eyeballs on your website, and you want them to stick with it more often. Except offering quality content you’ll need some good graphics for your site. Number one tip: If you’re serious about your site don’t use free, generic template. I would go even further. Don’t use paid template that is available online for others to buy. Pay someone to design a unique website for you. It doesn’t need to be jaw dropping and very expensive. A simple, pretty enough, and unique look would be good for starters.

4. Competitors

Whatever you do, you have to be more innovative, original, have a better design, better content than your competitors. Simply try to beat the competition. Use them to learn what works for them, and what doesn’t. Don’t be antagonistic towards them. Instead try to befriend them and let them become your mentors. They rule your niche at this moment. Learn what they did in order to achieve what they are now. That doesn’t mean just to read their blogs daily, but to investigate what they are doing. Where is their presence, who is linking to them, what CMS are they using, their SEO etc.

5. Promotion

Promote your site whenever you have a chance to do it, but do not exaggerate (don’t be a spammer). Also several things to remember here:

• use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or any other social platform popular at the moment,
• comment on other blogs related to your niche,
• be active on forums,
• guest post frequently on well established blogs,
• pay for ads if you really have to (Adwords).

This will certainly lead to significant exposure of your site. If you have the previous 4 points in place it’s just a matter of time when the ball starts rolling.

6. Speed

Make your site load fast as much as possible. This is important from two aspects: user experience and a SEO factor. Several things to remember:

• Use good server
• Optimize your code,
• Optimize the images,
• Use sprites,
• Use tools such as Google Speed, YSlow, Web Page Test, Pingdom,
• Gzip and minify your pages and static components where possible,
• Make your pages cacheable (both server and browser side),
• Use CDN for static content,
• If you’re using scripts, prefer asynchronous loading or place them at the bottom,
• Avoid redirects,
• Read in details what Google and Yahoo have to say about it.

7. E-mail addresses and RSS subscribers

Usually young webmasters and bloggers are overwhelmed with information and it might happen to forget to implement thing or two or they may think that some of the tips are irrelevant and not worth. So remember, capture e-mail addresses and get people to subscribe to your feed early. Two-three years from now (if you’re good) you might have 50k email list and 50k RSS Subcribers. And that is a big valuable asset. Trust me.

8. Monetization

This is the cherry on top of the cake. It’s time to gather the fruits of your labor. I’ll suggest don’t do it early. Wait some time until your blog gets traction. The possibilities are virtually endless and experimentation is the key. There are basically three main methods to get money out of your blog/site:

• Placing ads (CPC, CPM, CPA, CPV). Basically you need click, page view, action or video view in order to get paid.
• Promoting affiliate products.
• Selling you own products (ebooks, membership websites, services – design, coding, coaching, et

Blog

It is 2008; do we still need to ask ourselves what a blog is? I think so, and for two reasons. First of all we still have many misconceptions about blogging floating around the web. Pretty much every week I get at least one email from someone asking if I believe blogging has a future. My answer is always “as long as the Internet has a future, blogs do too.” You will see why I answer that below.
You also have countless articles being published every week where the author suggests that blogs are obsolete, and that the next big thing is micro blogging, or lifestreaming or something else. Again I don’t agree with any of those predicted trends.
The second reason for trying to define what a blog is in 2008 (many people have already done that in the past after all) is because blogging is a social phenomenon. As such, it is constantly evolving, and what was true two years ago might not be anymore.

Blogs Aren’t Necessarily Personal

The main misconception regarding the definition of blogs comes from people that associate blogs with their content. More specifically from people that associate blogs with the content from one particular type of blog: personal blogs.
In other words, those people think that blogs are online diaries where people share their opinions, ramblings and personal events.
Wrong!
That is just one of the things that you could do with a blog.
Today blogs are being used for all sorts of purposes. You have companies that use blogs to communicate and interact with customers and other stake holders. Newspapers that incorporated blogs to their main website to offer a new channel for their writers. Individuals that created a blog to share with the world their expertise on specific topics. And so on.

Separate The Content

If you separate the content from the website, it becomes much easier to work with the definitions.
Consider a person that wants to publish a Questions & Answers column online. She could use several types of websites for that purpose.
She could create an online forum, for example, where each thread would be an answer to a specific question. She could create a static HTML website and publish all the questions and answers on a single page. She could create a wiki where users would be able to edit the questions and answers directly. Finally, she could also create a blog where each post would contain a question and its answer.
As you can see, the content is not attached to the website. The picture below illustrates that (note that only four types of websites were used, but there are many more).

Obviously one type of website will be more suitable for a certain purpose than others. It would be easier for a company to use an online forum on its customer support section, for instance.

So What Is A Blog?

A blog is basically a type of website, like a forum or a social bookmarking site. As such it is defined by the technical aspects and features around it, and not by the content published inside it.
The features that make blogs different from other websites are:

• content is published in a chronological fashion
• content is updated regularly
• readers have the possibility to leave comments
• other blog authors can interact via trackbacks and pingbacks
• content is syndicated via RSS feeds

Keep in mind that it is the bundle of those features that should define a blog. An online forum could also offer an RSS feed for example, but that would not make it a blog.

What Is Your Definition?

As I mentioned on the beginning of this article, blogs represent a social phenomenon, so they are in constant evolution. The Internet itself is changing very fast, so pin pointing a single definition for blogging is a hard task.
The definition above is my personal one, and I am sure that other people will want to add or remove details to it. Some might even completely disagree.
That is why I decided to turn the mic to the readers. I want to hear what you think a blog is. What characteristics define it? Is the definition changing over time?