I was asked recently to put together a list of site marketing and SEO-related tips and tricks based on the last few months (and years, with other projects) of experience I’ve had trying to help build traffic on Protagonize.

(Beware, this is pretty long, but I hope it’ll be of use to you.)

Curiously, until I launched Protagonize, I really hadn’t given much explicit thought to optimizing my site for search engines. I just kind of assumed that if people wanted to find me, they would, and if not, I didn’t really care. Of course, with a personal blog, it’s easy to blow off doing any kind of serious SEO work. I had no real incentive to get myself ranked higher, so why bother?

Along came Protagonize, shortly before New Year’s eve last year. After spending several months working on the site, I immediately launched into trying to get the site to rank higher in various search engines. Apparently, this is a slightly more difficult task than I had imagined. I’m by no means an expert (obviously not, since my blog’s PageRank currently ranks higher than Protagonize’s, for whatever reason), but since I did manage to generate a decent amount of daily traffic out of absolutely nothing, I figured I’d publish my unscientific findings so far and post updates as I experiment.

I’ll try and keep these concise, from the more general to the more specific. Feel free to suggest other techniques or alternatives, and I’ll add them to the list. I also keep track of various SEO links on del.icio.us, so feel free to subscribe to my SEO bookmarks feed there as well.

General SEO Tips

• Content is king. Really. Your spamblog isn’t going to generate much traffic — the more content you produce, and the better the quality, the more you have to work with. This is a given, but you’d be surprised how many people sit around bitching and moaning about lack of traffic when their site is a piece of crap to begin with. If you don’t have a good foundation to build on, you may as well stop here.
• Build your personal brand. There’s nothing wrong with being an individual and standing behind your site or product; in fact, many of the biggest breakthrough products and sites out there have a single, outspoken iconic visionary behind them. Think Steve Jobs, Kevin Rose, Jimmy Wales, Michael Arrington, Scott Guthrie, Robert Scoble, Om Malik, Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, Evan Williams, Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore, etc. The list goes on. Larger-than-life personalities, but each backing a site or corporation in which they’re seen as brand leaders and product evangelists. Keep working on your personal blog, and build a following. Write insightful, thought-provoking posts on topics you’re familiar with or passionate about. Or just make yourself known as an expert in your selected field. Technosailor has an excellent post elaborating on this topic here.
• Haven’t launched yet? Post previews. Post blog entries or even Flickr screenshots of your site or product. If it hasn’t launched yet, this will help generating some initial buzz, and will get your key search terms indexed before your site is even available.
• Use Firefox. Even if you use Internet Explorer or Safari (or heaven forbid, Opera) as your main browser, make sure you at least have Firefox installed. There are a variety of plugins available (see below) that will make your site marketing and management life much easier.

Self-Promotion & Marketing

• Submit to search engines. This is pretty much a given, and can be done automatically via a hundred different web tools. Hit up the big players — Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, and so on. There are others, too, but those are the three you need to make sure to be included in quickly.
• Get listed on social news sites. Hit up Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Stumbleupon, etc. Create an account on each if you don’t have one. Fill out your profile, complete with your info and your site’s info. Then go and post your site. Some sites may not like this quite so much and consider it unsavoury behaviour (try and watch the terms and conditions of use before posting, but all the ones I’ve listed have allowed me to post my own content.) Traditional news/link filter sites like Slashdot or MetaFilter can also generate amazing amouts of traffic, but are much more difficult to get listed on as they depend mainly on editorial staff or community veto power to get onto the homepage. Either way, these kinds of sites (especially Stumbleupon and MetaFilter so far) have generated an avalanche of traffic for me.
• List yourself on social bookmarking sites. This goes hand-in-hand with the last step. Hit up del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Yahoo!’s My Web, etc. Create accounts, list your site. With any luck, someone will have already done the deed for you, but if your site is brand new, getting a del.icio.us Popular listing for an evening can do wonders for your traffic.
• Submit your site. Are you (yet another) Web 2.0 startup? Hit up the usual suspects: TechCrunch, Mashable, Ajaxian, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM. There are plenty of others out there. If you’re not sure of the appeal of your site, pick a slow news day to submit on. If you’ve got the next big thing — do the opposite. Pitch your site to the editors at prime time on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Those are the days most likely to catch eyeballs.
• Submit your site, redux. Are you a niche site? Do you appeal to a smaller, specific segment of web users? In Protagonize’s case, I submitted the site manually (i.e. via email) to a variety of literary sites and blogs, interactive fiction sites and indexes, mainstream media sites, etc. This will help build up your credibility outside of the tech blogs (if, like in my case, you started with those.) Protagonize was featured on CBC.ca/Arts and will soon be covered in the Georgia Straight’s Techno Logic column — I count both of these articles as more important than most blog coverage I’ve had to date because they’re directly aimed at my target audience.
• Get setup on the traffic monitoring sites. By that, I mean setup a profile for your site on Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast at the very least. For very little effort invested, at worst you’ll gain some serious insight into your site’s audience, and with a little more effort, you may even generate more buzz and traffic to your site. There are a couple of others like Ranking.com that are smaller but may still be worthwhile. On top of the freebies, Netcraft, Nielsen//NetRatings and ComScore are also out there, but generally require paid accounts.
• Get listed in the bigger directories. DMOZ, Yahoo, etc. This can take a while, especially with the open directory (DMOZ) because they’re completely volunteer-driven. Protagonize still isn’t listed in the open directory (after over two months!), but I’ve done a little better with the others. This is especially important because Google’s own directory comes directly from DMOZ.
• Get in touch with startup and local tech bloggers. I ran into Tris Hussey of Maple Leaf 2.0 and Jevon MacDonald of StartupNorth.ca a few months back at the Office 2.0 conference and kept in touch with both of them. This turned into some decent coverage on both blogs, and contacts I can update with new site features or even new products down the line. Rob Lewis of Techvibes Vancouver is another one I plan on contacting regularly with updates.
• Blog religiously. I’m sure many people have a tough time with this, because I do. Writing is a bitch (except on Protagonize, /shameless plug/). But the more you write, the more of a persona you build up, the more people take notice. Especially if what you produce is quality. Talk about yourself, discuss your passions, evangelize your product. Either way, just make sure you keep writing.
• Feedburner. Assuming your site or service produces an RSS feed, you shouldn’t miss out on this. You can also embed Google AdSense advertisements in your FeedBurner feeds, now.
• Technorati. Make sure your blog pings Technorati with all updates. On the flip side, keep track of your blog reactions on Technorati to see what people are saying about you or your product. This can be very interesting to follow. Technorati posts also tend to get indexed by Google very quickly (i.e. within minutes), and if that happens, it’ll drive up your Google ranking (or generate one if you hadn’t already had one) in a hurry.
• Setup a Facebook page. This takes only a couple of minutes and lets you harness the viral beast that is Facebook. Even if you’re a hater, do it. It’s worth it. Then you can also tie into Facebook social actions and use their advertising service / platform to get qualified site leads on the cheap.
• Microblogging. You have Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku accounts, don’t you? Post your site on all of them. Information is king — so keep on spreading it. The viral nature of Facebook’s news feed alone can bring you huge amounts of traffic. Twitter and Pownce (especially if you have a lot of followers/friends) can give you an excellent boost, too.
• Create a Twitter account for your product. If you have a product, setup an account for it on Twitter and let your users follow it. Follow them in return and spread your updates out to an even larger audience. If you do this, though, make sure to update regularly. I’ve just recently setup a Twitter account for Protagonize and I plan on posting updates to it several times a week.
• List yourself in various wikis. From Wikipedia to AboutUs.org, there are a variety of wikis out there where you can get yourself listed. Since most are fully editable, this should be one of your easier tasks to accomplish. Also, while not completely a wiki, TechCrunch’s CrunchBase is worth adding your organization to, as well.
• Nurture your community. Building and nurturing a user community within your site’s confines is probably one of the most important things you can do to enhance your site’s rankings and build traffic. It all ties back into content quality, as well. There are a million explanations out there of how to go about doing this (and it’s not easy), so I’ll just refer you to Derek Powazek’s excellent (if slightly dated) book, Design for Community, and point you over to Web Social Architecture for further reference.

Site Tweaks and Optimizations

• Get your META tags straight. First things first. Make sure your META tags are within appropriate lengths for each field, and make sense. Various tools listed below will help you optimize these. Google AdWords can also help you narrow down appropriate keywords without actually paying for AdWords placements (in addition to searching each term you want to use to make sure it’s not completely inundated with results.) When browsing site sub-pages, if you can include a snippet of page content in the META description instead of a canned description from your homepage; that’s probably a better idea than reusing the same description everywhere.
• Make sure your page content makes sense to crawlers. Make sure your HTML TITLE tag is consistent and scores highly in SEO tests. Make sure there’s enough content on your pages (especially if you have aggregator pages) to allow for the page to be indexed properly. Try and stick within reasonable limits for total links on the page, headings, and important tag content (WebCEO is great for testing this.) Use semantic markup and make sure the most important content on your page is arranged in order of importance and is enclosed in appropriate tags (i.e. make sure headlines use H1, H2, H3 tags, etc.)
• Set your site up with Google Webmaster Tools. Google’s webmaster toolkit allows you to run a variety of site diagnostics and statistics, verify that your site has been properly crawled, check for HTTP errors during crawling, consolidate search results to a single domain/subdomain, setup sitemaps (see next item), etc. Very handy.
• Create a Google Sitemap. It’ll help Google index your site content properly. This is one that I have yet to accomplish as my site is completely custom-built and I’d need to accomodate Google by producing some kind of dynamically updated sitemap. There are a variety of tools out there to automatically generate a Google Sitemap from existing content, though, including for blogs packages like WordPress.
• Add a robots.txt file. See the Web Robots Pages for more info.
• Add social media links. For bloggers, there are a variety of modules that you can just plugin, but if you’re running a custom-built site, make sure to add visible links for users to fan you on Facebook, post your site on MySpace, follow you on Twitter, Digg or Mixx your site, etc. Let your users spread the word!
• Produce RSS feeds. Bloggers can disregard this since it should already be happening auto-magically for you… but if your product doesn’t already generate RSS feeds, do so. They’ll get picked up all over the place and the more content you have being spread around, the better for your site.
• Setup friendly URLs. Semantically meaningful URLs (for example, http://www.protagonize.com/story/joyride links to the currently featured story on Protagonize) will not only get indexed higher due to having keywords directly in the URL string, they’ll also be easier to remember for both yourself and your users. Consult your web host about setting up mod_rewrite (on Apache) or a 3rd party tool like Helicon’s ISAPI Rewrite 3 on IIS in order to rewrite friendly URLs for your site, if it can’t do it out of the box. Most blog software packages will handle this for you with some very minor customization.
• Build an API. I’m guilty of not having built an API for Protagonize out of the gate. I’m hoping to get something going within the next month or two, even if it’s basic, but I have so many features planned (and a day job) that it’ll be tough to squeeze in.
• Build a Facebook app. This one is a bit more extreme; if you have the time, resources, and will to build one, and if it can actually be of use to your users, building a Facebook application to pull Facebook users back to your site can be a major draw. Again, Facebook’s viral nature can lay down a world of hurt on your site if you happen to become popular, but if nothing else, this can be a good, free value-add to your existing membership.

Useful Tools

• Google Analytics. The obvious choice for stats tracking and site metrics. I don’t think I need to get into any detail here.
• DomainTools. This one actually came in quite handy. I accidentally came across this while searching for Protagonize entries on Google. I ended up at the DomainTools Protagonize.com listing and started tweaking away. Very useful.
• Use the SEO Workers Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool. Yes, it’s a mouthful, but it works wonders when you’re optimizing page content, descriptions, and keywords. I can’t say enough good things about this one, and it’s totally free.
• WebCEO. A desktop application that I discovered via the UK’s Practical Web Design magazine. A totally free version is available that does a lot of SEO analysis and suggests performance optimizations for your site. They will, however, spam you like crazy. Be prepared to be emailed by them at least once or twice a week after downloading the app.
• Xinu. A nifty little site that lets you analyze your backlinks and social bookmarking site rankings.
• SEO blogs. There are quite a few out there worth checking out (and no, they’re not all horribly cheesy.) I’d recommend SearchEngineWatch, SEONoobs, GrayWolf’s SEO Blog, SEOmoz, SEOCracy, and the Google Webmaster Central blog are among my favourites.

Firefox Plugins

A quick list of can’t-live-without SEO and site marketing-related plugins:

• Firefox Web Developer Toolbar. Easy management of your META tags.
• SearchStatus Firefox plugin. Lets you monitor Google PageRank, Alexa and Compete ranks all in one handy Firefox status bar.
• Alexa Sparky Firefox plugin. Nice little graph of your Alexa rank and 3-month trend.
• Compete Site Profile Firefox plugin. I don’t use this one since I already get the Compete ranking via SearchStatus, but it’s available in case you like the added benefits.
• Firebug for FireFox. Not an SEO tool, but as a site operator you really ought to use it. :)
• Yahoo!’s YSlow for Firebug. Provides valuable site performance enhancement and optimization tips.
• SeoQuake. Recommended by a reader. Allows you to see many search engine parameters on the fly. Looks like it offers the possibility of some dodgy practices, though. (There’s also an IE version of this one.)

Whew, that was a lot longer than I expected. If this was of value to you, please let me know! Also, if you have suggestions or comments on things I have have missed, please comment here and I’ll make changes to the list as necessary.

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Tags: seo, search, engine, optimization, howto, tips, tools, reference, resources