A key part to the success of any website is content.  If you are basing the business on traffic then the more content the better.  You can write that content yourself, buy it or you can design a site that causes your users to provide the content for you.

You have likely visited many sites yourself where you are welcome to share and contribute.  Each time someone does, whether it is to vent, rant or console, the site benefits by the addition of more content.  A big factor in all search engine ranking is the number of pages in the site.  If you can leverage the work of others, it can make the difference between having dozens of pages (or hundreds if you are prolific) and having thousands of pages.

Ultimately unless it is completely out of place, think about putting forums on your site.  It is the best way to get contributions without having to invent a new paradigm.  If you are hosting on a dedicated server then you likely have to find the software yourself, but on most shared hosting providers there is already software in place for you to leverage.

In searching the web sometimes you find a really comprehensive source and today we have a link that fits our seach engine optimization goal.  The company is in Australia and seems to always have a clear opinion on everything from coding standards to search engine optimization.

Check out what SSW has to say about the subject of Better Google Ranking.

When you setup a website you will undoubtedly get a web hosting plan that includes not only a set amount of hard drive space for your pages, but also a budget of bandwidth that your site can utilize.  This number can be anything from 100 Megabytes (MB) per month to thousands of Gigabytes (GB) per month.  Often this vital statistic is ignored as people are looking forward to the problem of having too much traffic.  While most web sites that are created don't consume massive bandwidth, don't plan for your own failure by completely ignoring this factor when you sign up with a web hosting company.  At least ensure you get a reasonable amount of bandwidth based on what your site will be doing.  For instance if you are hosting home videos for a large group you may find that even 10 GB per month is not enough.  If on the other hand you have a modestly designed site that leverages background colors more than graphics you may find that 100 MB is more than enough even once you get the site to your desired user community.

The bottom line is to factor in all the relevant areas so you don't find yourself regretting your choices.

When you sign up for a web hosting company to put your site on their server you are typically looking at a very low price (under $20 per month and sometimes under $5 per month) and in these cases the web hosting company is actually not using a dedicated server for your site.  If they were then they would be out of business very soon.  The fact is that in this situation you are signing up for shared hosting and that means that your website might me one of dozens or even hundreds of other web sites hosted on that same server.  The advantages of this of course is the price.  You could never get a dedicated server for the same price (they typically run over $100 per month for the bare bones package and can run into the thousands per month).  The disadvantages are more numerous.  On a Shared Hosting plan you cannot install any software that isn't already part of the package, you might be sharing the same IP address as many other sites and the server is distinguishing requests by address once they arrive at the server, and most importantly if someone on the same server as you compromises the server with their web application (in the case of dynamic code) then your site is going to be dragged down too.

This isn't an attempt to completely scare you off of Shared Hosting solutions, but be warned about the disadvantages before you jump at the price.  I use shared hosting of simple sites that I consider low security, for everything else I go Dedicated Server all the way.