You may have heard of Cuil, the latest website to be granted the title Google-Killer. With all the attention given to the search engine giant Google over the last couple years, it is often wondered aloud, who will be the next Google? While its impossible to say whether another company can catch lightening in a bottle in the unique (and profitable) way Google did, every year there are scores of competitors that are suggested as the next Google-Killer, unsurprisingly, you likely haven’t heard of many of these because they didn’t last. So what makes the latest competitor to get media attention a contender? Cuil seeks to build on some of Google’s most successful features, of course without infringing on Google’s trademarks, but is laying claim to indexing a far larger number of sites in its search, roughly 120 Billion websites.

In recent years, with the worldwide spread of broadband internet access, it has become increasingly common for site designers to disregard the load time of their websites. Sites have swelled to unwieldy size, and it has become increasingly uncommon for webmasters to pay attention to the load time of their site. But with the advent of mobile web browsing, it is once again important to consider your site’s load time and different methods to reduce how long a site takes to appear on a device, such as a Blackberry or an iPhone. Its worth noting, however that efficiency never became less important; people just paid less attention to it. One of the simplest ways to decrease your sites load time is to optimize your pictures for the web.

When you start expanding your business, it makes sense that your servers will have to handle an increasing load of traffic. Mitigating high traffic levels, especially those caused by traffic spikes from sites like Digg and other social news sites, is important to keeping your business online under all conditions. One of the technologies that makes keeping all of your data online much simpler is called load balancing. Simply put it is a web technology that spreads the contents of your server over multiple, redundant systems, allowing you to run traffic to all of the different servers and keep any one machine from enduring too much traffic. There are numerous ways to implement a load balancing system, but by far the best is to have load balancer software running on one server that forwards users to one of the proper servers, preventing the user ever having to deal with choosing a server. You will notice that your machines are consistently fast after you implement such a system.

One of the recent phenomenons to take hold online has been the rise of social networking sites. Perhaps the most unique of all these sites is the exceedingly popular stumbleupon. Stumbleupon offers users the ability to install a toolbar on their browser and browse the web in an entirely new fashion: randomly. It isn’t entirely random, it’s even better than that, it groups sites by category and lets users rate which sites they like. It then uses these ratings to try to send you to sites you will enjoy. The network is large, and a lot of people are using the site, or stumbling, in their terminology. Stumbleupon is not just a great way to find new and interesting websites; it is also a great way to promote your website! By putting your site in their database you can be guaranteed an increase in traffic, but it is important to take certain steps when going about using the service.

KickApps.com is a great way for a site with relatively high traffic to increase visitor retention and enhance the user experience. The site serves up server side applications that you can use to develop a series of robust social networking resources for your site. This is the key to the success they have had, harnessing the visitors you already have by letting them network with each other. By connecting your customers, serving them content, and letting them communicate, you are going to create a community that attracts new visitors, leads current visitors to staying on the site longer, and which collects important information your advertisers want to know.

Getting readers to participate in your blog is an important part to growing it. If there is not an active discussion in your posts, your blog is probably not helping your site, because individuals aren’t getting enough out of the posts to participate. The best way to guarantee repeat traffic is to foster an environment of open discussion in your blog.

1. Address your readers:

Your writing is, after all, for them, so ask them to get involved, even if its just suggesting future topics or encouraging them to express an opinion on the topic. If you can target your readers needs and interests, you will get a lot more repeat traffic.