Effective Website Design For Massive Traffic

STEP 1:Do your homework

Plan and think about your content. Think big, have a vision of at least a 100 page site. The pages should have "real content", as opposed to link pages, resource pages, about/copyright... etc pages.

STEP 2:Buy Domain name:

Invest in an easily brandable domain. You may want "google.com" and not "mykeyword.com". Keyword domains will go no where, whereas branding and name recognition are the in thing. The value of keywords in a domain name have never been less to Search Engines. Get them

STEP 3:Site Design:

As a rule of the thumb: develop for MS Internet Explorer. As for text content, it should out weigh the html content. Spiders are not to the point they really like eating html 4.0 and the mess that it can bring.

Use less of these heavy stuff: flash, dom, java, java script. Go external with scripting languages if you must have them - there is little reason to have them that I can see - they will rarely help a site and stand to hurt it greatly due to many factors most people don't appreciate (search engines distaste for javascripts is just one of them).

Arrange the site in a logical manner with directory names hitting the top keywords you wish to hit.

Don't clutter and don't spam your site with frivolous links like "best viewed" or other counter like junk. Keep it clean and professional to the best of your ability.

Visit Google.com and learn from them. Simple is retro cool - simple is what surfers want.

Your site should respond almost instantly to a request. If you get into even 3-4 seconds delay until "something happens" in the browser, you are in long term trouble. That 3-4 seconds response time may vary for site destined to live in other countries than your native one. The site should respond locally within 3-4 seconds (max) to any request.

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STEP 4:Check Page Size:

The smaller the better. Keep it under 15k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 12k if you can. The smaller the better. Keep it under 10k if you can.

STEP 5:Build Content:

Build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words. If you aren't sure what you need for content, start with the Overture.com