By Philip Wik

Launching a website requires three things: An idea, a domain name, and web pages.

You probably already have the idea. But give careful thought to your domain name. This link will give you excellent guidance.

The next step is to code your site. Although there are many WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") web products, I think it's fun to code in HTML. This is my short tutorial on how to do so. I also recommend these computer products and web services.



Building Internet Traffic

Google recently reported that the average blog gets one hit a day. The majority of web sites get no more than a dozen or so page views each day at best, with most hits coming from its author. My Mall will most likely never be in the Alexa top 100,000, but it is starting to make a respectable showing.

Here is my formula to traffic: Content + Time + Backlinks = Traffic

Content means something that is unique, not so much in style and technology as in verbiage. Verbiage is a lot of original words over many pages in a format that search engines can pick up. Without content, no amount of time and backlinks will be of much use. Think of content as the number one and time and backlinks as zeroes.

Time refers to the longevity of your site. As time goes by, more readers will come across your site and read or link to it, so long as you have a compelling website. Even websites that are left dorment tend to grow, assuming that the original site had content.

Backlinks, in my opinion, is what brings a website to a higher level. Ideally, the links should be from similar, highly ranked sites and should be unreciprocated. However, I've found that numerous low ranked sites with content that is irrelevant to mine still pushes up my traffic. In other words, the search engines do not appear to penalize for irrelevant links from low PR sites, so far as I can tell.

The key is to experiment by keep building your backlinks and your content, and if you find something that pushes up your traffic, stick with it and expand on it.