Spreading the SEO Goodness
Once you've finished your beautiful site, filled it with wonderful, witty, unique, useful, engaging, up to date and relevant content and fully optimised every last aspect of it, there is still work to be done. You have to let people and robots know you exist.
You have to cast your net upon the erm.. net.
Search Engine submission
It could be argued that one of the main distinctions be web masters and SEO's is that the SEO really comes into her own once the site is up and running.
The first thing to be done is to get yourself webmaster accounts at Google, Yahoo and Live, then set about submitting your xml sitemaps.
You may also consider listing with vertical search engines or B2b Sites like business.com
Press Releases
A great way to raise awareness (and in-bound links) is to write and distribute your own press releases. Again, they will need to be relevant to the content of your site and interesting enough.
Some of the better distribution networks are:
Each offers a variety of services and levels of involvement across a variety of price structures. There may also be specific services unique to your market niche or corner of the world - so look around.
Local Optimisation
If you do business in a specific geographical location (like a city, county, suburb or town) it makes enormous sense to optimise and submit to the regional or local search engines.
Recent (Apr 2009) discussions at SMX Sydney suggest that Google ranks local listings in the following hierarchy here in Australia:
So while Yellow Pages still costs a fair whack, the others do not, meaning that there is still a large amount of leverage to be gained from getting your business listed and optimised locally.
Most of the big search engines now cater for local business listings but it will depend on your country of residence or operations.
Get Involved
Blogs are a great (and popular) way to generate plenty of interesting, relevant and frequent content, make it widely available and encourage participation by others on your site.
It's not all beer and skittles, however, as blogs can also be quite demanding creatures, requiring regular updates, oversight and moderation. It can be quite time consuming to skin your blog well enough to integrate it seamlessly into the rest of your site.
Of course you can always pay someone else to maintain your blog for you, and you can pay someone to write it for you too, but the purpose of the blog should ideally be to demonstrate or share your expertise, to act as a platform to express your unique and qualified viewpoint, your voice, and this may be considerably diluted if out-sourced.
It is important to remember what a blog is - an invitation to your readers to respond. With this in mind, don't write your posts like bland press releases. Rather, right from closer to the heart - put some personality into what you write the better to invoke life from your readers.
Participate on other people's related blogs or forum posts. Spend some time looking around the web for services that relate to what you do, and where there is an opportunity to get involved and to participate, do so.
Not everywhere will allow you to attach links back to relevant bits or your own site, but some will and you will learn that it's nice to be nice.
And beyond
Traffic can be gleaned from all over the place:
Video and photo sites
Places like youtube and flickr can add size to your net as well as good face in the wider community.
Wikis
Make your company a wikipedia page, complete an aboutus.org profile, submit yourself to dmoz.org and the venerable yahoo directory.
