1. Quick load times so users get what they want faster. If you want a great example of how important this is look no further than google.
2. Less bandwidth usage.
3. Search Engines factor in a quality score for every page - for both Google Adwords bidding and Search Engine rankings speed is a quality factor.

Measuring Speed - What gets Measured gets Managed.

1. How fast is it? See what the website’s load times are from servers all over the world at Internet Supervision’s tool.
2. For a second opinion, you can check the Pingdom Tool which checks from the US and also saves records.
3. A third option is Vertain’s Speed Analysis Tool.
4. A really good 4th option is LinkVendor’s Speed Analysis Tool.

At this point you should have a really good idea of what your website’s speed is, and also some idea of what your website’s speed is from across the globe. Two of these tools already provide a breakdown and show you what the breakup of components on your webpage is - however, the second step deals solely and fully with this.

Identifying Webpage Components and their Impact on Speed

1. Go back to the Pingdom Tool and the Link Vendor Analysis tool and see what components they show.
2. Now, go to the Website Optimization Site and try out their tool since it provides an excellent breakdown, and also recommendations.
3. Finally (optional) download firefox and download YSlow from Yahoo. This plug-in lets you test any website on Yahoo Developer Network’s recommended guidelines. You could just look at the guidelines - however, the tool is super useful.

At this point you should have an understanding of how many http requests your webpage makes, the size of html, the size and number of image, css, and javascript files, and other factors. You should also have list of recommendations from YSlow, the YahooDevNetwork guidelines page, and WebSiteOptimization.

Understanding that you don’t have to trade User Benefits for Speed.

A mistake that people make is assuming you have to cut out items to improve speed. The secret is that you can use a combination of reducing http requests (by combining elements), html and css compression, caching, compression of images, and removing some webpage elements to achieve huge speed benefits.

Furthermore there are some features that you might think improve user benefit - however, sometimes the most simple design is the most powerful. Again, google comes to mind. Reading Jakob Nielsen’s blog on user friendly design is another good idea.

Setting Targets for User Experience and Speed and Hitting Them

It’s really important to do these hand in hand as they are interrelated - basically, you should have a priority/benefit and cost in terms of size/time with each of the components. This can be in your hand although noting it down always works better. I’d just list down each component and associate a priority/benefit and a cost/size with each - something that looks like (i’m taking a wordpress blog to simplify things)

1. Main HTML - Necessary as this is what people read. P0. Size: 21 Kb.
2. CSS 1 (for blog) - Necessary. P0. Size: 7 Kb.
3. CSS 2 (for plug-in X) - Nice To Have P2. Size 5Kb.
4. Plug-In X Javascript - Nice To Have P2. Size 9Kb.
5. Analytics Package - Crucial P0. Size 2Kb (this is the main Wordpress.com stats package which is really light and easy to use and read).
6. Additional Analytics Package - Nice to Have. P2. Size 8Kb.
7. Social Sharing PlugIn JavaScript - Important P1. Size: 6Kb.
8. Logo: Crucial for Branding P0. Size: 11 Kb.
9. Image1: Important P1. Size 23 Kb.
10. Image 2: Nice To Have P2. Size 33 Kb.

At this point I’d have something that is 125 Kb and makes 10 HTTP Requests (approximately).  The first step would be to remove the P2 as user experience and speed is definitely more important than them (This is a personal decision and this is why you have to set and execute on targets for features/user value and speed/user experience at the same time. Just removing P2 features/items brings us down from 125 Kb and 10 HTTP requests to 70Kb and 6 HTTP Requests.

Now, I’d look at what I can do with each

1. Main HTML - HTML gzip compression. Brings down size a lot - usually by half or more so Size: 11 Kb.
2. CSS 1 (for blog) - CSS Compression (there is also a css-compress wordpress plugin) brings down the size a lot - again by half or more so Size: 3 Kb.
3. Analytics Package - Crucial P0. Size 2Kb (this is the main Wordpress.com stats package which is really light and easy to use and read). Not sure if this qualifies as internal or external javascript so PHP-Speedy may or may not be able to combine this.
4. Social Sharing PlugIn JavaScript - Important P1. Size: 6Kb. Ditto as Analytics Package.
5. Logo: Use jpeg compression and a little optimization to cut down the size of this. Size: 5 Kb.
6. Image1: Again use jpeg compression to handle this. Size 15 Kb.

What this gives us is a reduced size of 42Kb (as compared to 70 Kb earlier), and using PHP Speedy we can bring down number of HTTP Requests to 4 (approx.). Of course if we give more weightage to speed and ease of usage we can bring down the size and number of http requests even further.

At this point it is crucial to again go through the tools to see speed of your website and what components are being downloaded/used.

Using these relatively straightforward optimizations we brought our size down from 125 Kb to 42 Kb, and number of HTTP REquests down from 10 to 4 or so. This is a HUGE improvement. In addition there are a few more things to explore which I’ll get into in an advanced post including

1. Using CSS or Image Maps to combine Images and reduce number of HTTP Requests.
2. Using Caching of Pages on your server (crucial if you use wordpress).
3. Using caching of PHP calls. Minimizing PHP Calls.
4. And much more.

The truth is that most websites use an inordinate amount of images, javascript, and other additions and stray away from simple elegant design.  Optimization of not only the elements of a page but also of the page’s design is necessary to get the fastest pages. Every single part of your page should pull its weight in terms of user benefit, design or some other intrinsic value. Best of luck optimizing your pages - btw, I do want to put up a real life example here so if you happen to have a page that is greater than 100 Kb and makes a ton of requests let me know and I’ll guide you through the optimization in return for you letting me  use your page as an example.

So at the Google Keyword tool you can find out how many people a month search for ’seo’ , what the trends are, how competitive each keyword is, and also related terms that might be useful.

this is really, really big - because it’s free, and it’s from Google based on their data. Now, any beginner website owners don’t need to buy any keyword tools (they still have their merits).

Basically, I’ve never bought any keyword tool, although I’ve tried the free and demo versions of a few. And now I can confidently say - go try the Google Keywords tool first, and if it doesn’t work for you, then, and only then, go elsewhere.

Major Props to Google - who once again show that they are pro-website owners.

BTW there are two assumptions here - firstly, building a business - a long term sustainable business. And secondly, the view is 5-10 years and not a very short term view.

1. A short, short .com domain.
2. No hyphens. Just don’t - people never remember names like that. I’m speaking from painful personal experience.
3. Easy to pronounce with a few syllables - ideally 1 or 2.
4. Has a keyword in it without being too generic. CouponFish is a reasonable name. CouponCodes becomes too generic. Coupon.com of course is great - however way too expensive by now.
5. Great example of the types of names I’m talking about are veeo.com (on auction at tdnam), netflix, tivo and so forth.
6. If you were a big established business, would the name pass muster.  An example is the deals website cheapstingybas***.com who had to change his name to cheapstingybargains.com. Instead of changing the name down the line - consider whether the name suits a big audience.
7. Don’t pick too narrow of a niche. I helped arrange tangosoul.com for someone and was a bit upset that they didn’t want to use it.  Truth is - their stated reason that they might want to banch into dance in general down the line makes a lot of sense.  DanceNow.com is much better than SalsaNow.
8. Do not pick a hosted solution where you do not own everything. An exception is ning.com which lets you build social networks and also own your code and content. Wordpress.com is a nightmare to get off of because they don’t allow 301 redirects. Well, technically they do - however compared to their 5 minute install its a nightmarishly complicated ‘basically we don’t want to ever let you leave’ type of arrangement. So - don’t choose wordpress.com or blogger or livejournal or anything else if you think your site could ever take off or make you money.

Here are the things I can think of.

1. Google Webmaster Central - Google Webmaster Central provides a variety of valuable information including popular searches, inlinks, what GoogleBot finds as text for links to your site. In addition Google Webmaster Central lets you change the crawl speed, target a website to a specific region and some other options.
2. Google Analytics - Google bought Urchin which was an excellent web analytics company and made the product free (a really good move). By adding the Google Analytics javascript to your page’s code you can get really valuable and really comprehensive data on users to your site and their behaviour on your site.

I strongly recommend Google Webmaster Central. As far as Google Analytics it depends on how comfortable you are with leaving information in Google’s hands. Some good alternatives to Google Analytics are Mint, GoStats, Statcounter, etc. Also, if you’re using wordpress there are a variety of plugins including Wordpress’s own stats plugin.

1. Buying an aged domain is almost always better than buying a new one.
2. Buy a domain that is brandable and also has your keywords (or atleast one main keyword).
3. Domain names that are short, 1 or 2 syllables, and english words are always better. To the point that you should not be buying a domain name that is very long or not english words unless you have a really strong alleviating factor. youtube, facebook, myspace - all the recently successful big websites have names that are rememberable and brandable.
4. Domain names that are .coms are atleast 10 times as valuable as .net and .org. Also, .info domain names were really abused by spammers so stay away from them. Country specific domain names - I have no clue, search for tips.
5. Always do your due diligence when buying a domain or a website from someone.

A few additional tips

1. Use Google Trends and other sources for data on what the best keywords for your domain are.
2. Ask your friends and family about their thoughts on domain names. Having a name that customers can easily recall and type in is invaluable.
3. Do not mess around with copyright. However, its perfectly legal to get www.AppleReview.com provided that is actually what your website does.
4. Think of a domain as a name for your business. Be wary of very narrow (i.e. freecomdeybooks.com) or very time constrained names.

Choossing a domain name really is like choosing a name for a business and should be a well thought out process. Thanks in part to search engine behaviour and in part to customer behaviour there is very little scope to make changes to your domain name down the line. So think through this and choose a superstar domain name.

First - you don’t have to make a loser’s decision here. Go for both. Pick a brandable domain name that is also keyword rich. So if i were looking for a domain name for a shopping website I wouldn’t torture myself over whether shop-guide.com is better than spendr.com. I’d simply go for a name like shopfish.com or shopon.com which have the keyword(s) i want and also is brandable and memorable.

1. Add SEO Forums and create an environment to share knowledge and tips beyond what we provide.
2. Increase customer participation by including some additional forms of feedback on articles, perhaps polls, and in general making it easy to communicate (contact form). 
3. A better classification of articles - let users find articles according to Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Levels, let users find articles according to topic and also let users find articles according to tags and keywords. These are in addition to searching the site.

Please send in your suggestions - the 3rd aim is a gimme, and there’s more than enough time to fit in a few user requested aims.

1. Firstly, Google does give weightage to url and titles. Titles for pages are crucially important. URLs are somewhat important.
2. Secondly, that there is a lot that you can’t control when it comes to search engines. I control my focus on my customers and the quaity of the content on the website. However, its impossible to control search engine algorithms. However, search engines are constantly trying to find and bring the best pages and sites to users and if you focus on providing value and suplement it with smart seo the results will come.

Spectacular Success - YouTube is the poster child for this with the company getting sold for 1.65 billion in less than 2 years since it started. Facebook is another good example with a valuation in the billions.
Its important to understand that while you can certainly achieve this level of success, these are exceptional cases. Going in expecting to sell your website or company for a few billion is not a good aim to have.

Solid Success - Here I’d club all the companies and websites that get sold in the tens of millions of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars range.

Success - This is the sweet spot - There are more than enough opportunities on the internet that you can achieve this with a high probability (provided you choose carefully among the things that excite you and/or really put your heart into it). The market for cyclists (not motorbikes, bicycles) is approximately 8 billion dollars, that for bowling is 11 billion dollars, and that for wine is 23 billion dollars. And guess what - there is no single website that dominates these niches. If you’re passionate about this area (or about golf or football or stamps or fly fishing or comics) you can start your own website or blog and build it into one of the top (if not the top) destnations for this niche. And that’ll guarantee you a couple million dollars (probably more).

Extra income - This is the really scary category to be in. Basically, if you’re trying to just add on a few hundred or a few thousand dollars a month in extra income you’re in danger because the competition might be people who’re (based on passion or need) totally committed to a niche. I would strongly recommend you to consider another option. Its not the time committment that is the key factor here, its the level of passion and committment to your website and your customers. You can create and run a great website in 10-20 hrs a week. However, you have to be committed to creating something solid, else the competiton will eat you up.

The internet is perfect if you’re really passionate about an area and willing to give atleast 10, and ideally 20 or more hrs a week of your time to it. And in a way this site is focused on people who fit tis category. People who’re building a site around something they’re passionate about and have significant emotional investment and will contribute adequate time.

Zig Ziglar has a quote that is probably the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard regarding earning money -

You can get whatever you desire if you provide enough other people what they desire.

My advice would be to figure out what value you can provide before trying to make money off the internet. Too many people approach the internet with either fear (i could never do it - its too difficult) or greed (i’ll make a million in my first 3 months without working hard). That gives you a natural leg up. The internet provides you with a lot of opportunities (none more appealing than the ability to make money off whatever area/niche you desire) - However, working hard to create a website and product that provides value to customers is essential to make the most of the opportunity. And, if you choose wisely you can do something you love for a living and get rich off of it.
As far as ethics, there are very few (if any) businesses that survive without ethics. If you are looking to build a sustanable business its crucial to create trust and a relationship with customers and a strong company dna that includes good ethics and respect for customers is necessary.