Short term you can do well with major holes in a website, but what do you need to have a successful long-term website? I think every site should have at least all of the following criteria:

• credible sounding memorable domain name

• credible trustworthy site design
• credible content that people pay attention to
• link equity & marketing strategy
• profit strategy

Lets go through those one at a time:

Domain Name: Can you do well with a bad domain name? Of course you can short term, but long-term if your business name is hard to remember you are going to lose market share to people who have a more memorable domain name. I am not suggesting that everyone runs out and spends many thousands on their first domain name, but if your domain name is hard to remember, or people will not accept donations from your site because your domain name looks spammy, it is time for a change.

Credible Site Design: The logo on SEOBook.com cost $100 and the design on SEOBook.com cost $1,500. Both are probably worth at least 10 times that much. I started off with a default design and then bought the $100 logo, then eventually bought a nice site design. In many markets the market leader is determined by people outside the topical community. A beautiful site design makes it easy to vote for you and trust you.

Credible Content: If you are afraid of a manual review of your site content by a search engine then your site is not a sustainable site that will stay relevant. If nobody talks about your site you are losing marketshare.

Link Equity & Marketing Strategy: Editorial links come from conversation, which is often driven by marketing. What makes your site remarkable? If you are mainly ranking due to site age and old links, what can you do to keep your site relevant to the current market? Are the linkarati interested in your site?

Profit Strategy: Some sites are directly monetized through advertising, services, or product sales. Some sites are tools to build credibility and indirect revenue streams. Some sites have other nepotistic values such as a clean link source or a connection to the media.

Every Business Has Holes:
Many of the best sites start off as a hobby and move into biz model. Every market worth being in changes quickly, and every business person starts off with an imperfect business model, and then uses market feedback to move toward being more efficient. Google originally was designed as a project to measure the most authoritative links on the web and then they transitioned into being a search engine.

Filling in the Gaps:
Missing any of these pieces is just like monetizing via off topic pop ups, or other strategies that have moved into irrelevance. Google made the link an ad unit because people won't be able to ignore it.

A site can be successful with only one piece of the value chain done well, but if you fill in the gaps in the other parts of your site profile the profits will be much greater. If one is spread too thin working on too many projects it is easy to lose marketshare, but if you work hard on a few sites you are passionate about and listen to market feedback it is easy to quickly become a market leader.

What other things did I miss? What do you think is an important element in successful sustainable websites?

A friend of mine found out about a product that was first seen by them from a spam comment someone left on my site. The product helped automate content generation and syndication, aiming to help new webmasters distribute slightly unique spam across the web. My friend gave that person his email address and they email spam him non-stop. Marketing offers are no better than the marketing method they use to find you.

A couple friends recently mentioned The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. It is a great DVD from the perspective of a former Secretary of Defense, about the errors he made and the lessons he learned in his life.

It is mind boggling to hear about all the fire bombing in Japan, how serious the Cuban missile crisis was, and that the Vietnam war lasted so long due to a lack of empathy. So much has been smudged away from the school books. The DVD concludes a killer quote derived from T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time.

If you are new to an oversaturated market or want to reach an audience that normally ignores you, the easiest way to do so is to co-brand something they DO care about. Want examples? How to optimize your WORDPRESS BLOG and seo for FIREFOX come to mind.

In many markets the top ranked site is determined by popular opinion OUTSIDE their niche market.

If the top competing sites are monetized by feeds from third tier search engines and / or off topic pop ups you can probably buy targeted ads on their sites cheap. You don't need to rank if they already are, and if the ad buy helps you rank that is a bonus.

Many market leaders were just early to the market, and do not realize the potential they are wasting monetizing with antiquated marketing that is both cheap and poorly targeted.