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Have you ever wondered why it is that some websites succeed, while other websites fail? What is it about a given website that makes it durable, that helps it last through the good times and the bad? While there are certainly a variety of factors that go into a website's success, the fact is that the most successful websites tend to share certain traits. Some of these traits include:

* Relevance. Successful websites deal with a topic that people are interested in. Whether it is politics, childbirth, travel or the Internet itself, websites that are successful have content that centers around a popular topic.

* Timelessness. A website that deals with a popular topic, but a topic that is only popular for a short time, will probably either fail or it will have to find a new topic once the current one passes from the public eye. So, for example, a website might deal with the antics of a celebrity like Britney Spears. However, when people lose interest, the website will lose traffic. Instead, if the website deals with antics of female pop singers, or with celebrities in general, the website has a better chance of success.

* Quality design. There are many opinions about what good website design is. The fact here is that not every design will appeal to every person. Having said that, there are some characteristics of design that can indeed hurt a website's popularity and success. For example, large amounts of animated GIFs tend to do poorly. Websites that have many pop-ups also tend to not do as well. The same holds true for websites where advertising is overpowering or so persistent as to interfere with the content.

* Good content. Websites, to be successful, have to have good content. Good content is content that is well-written, and appeals to a felt need. If the content of a website is full of spelling and grammatical errors, web surfers will have no interest in staying at that website, or in purchasing products from that website.

* Search Engine Optimized. Successful websites are Search Engine Optimized. This means, basically, that the sites are put together and written in such a way that the search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, can easily figure out what the keywords most relevant to the site are.

Learn more about this author, John W. Paulus.
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