So you've launched your new site and your thinking you need to drive some traffic to it. You think back to the last site you did and can't remember what you did or what resources you used to get your first visitors. This is short guide to help in those initial SEO steps every new web site needs.

Keywords

Before you do any SEO work, you need to decide what keywords to focus on. Sit down and brainstorm a list of all the keywords you think are important. Then take the the top ten and focus on those. It is easy to get side tracked and overwhelmed when it comes to SEO so you need to stay focused on. Focus on a smaller sub set of keywords will help see result faster and will encourage you to work harder on your site.

Unique Title Tags

This is simple one but it is a must. What you need to do is review all your title tags and ensure each one correctly represents the page it refers to. This is also a good time to review your meta-tags and ensure they represent the content correctly. Remember each page should have it's own unique title and meta-tags (description and keywords).

Personally I find that best way to make title tags is to put the unique portion first. For example a page about Google SEO techniques would go look like this Google SEO Techniques - Site Name that way the search engines know what is more important about the tahe page, Google SEO techniques, but you all make sure your keyword rich site name is included.

XML and Standard Sitemap

Again, something simple but it is essential to get organic traffic quickly to your new site. There is many tools out there to generate them, http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/ is okay but I recommend writing a script in your dev language to automatically generate it so you ensure it is always up to date. Once you have both an XML sitemap and standard sitemap (web page with links to all your web site's pages) then you need to submit them to Google's webmaster central, MSN's Webmaster Tools and Yahoo's Site Explorer

Directory Links

Submit your site to minimum of a hundred free (or paid if you have a small budget) directories. You can get this done for about $10 from someone on digitalpoint forums. By doing this you are almost guaranteed to get indexed quickly. This isn't going to get you much if not any PR, it is simply to ensure you get some bots on your site. Directories are easy to get your link on them and the owners usually have some SEO experience so they probrably have bots on there sites that will queue yours as soon as they index the page that contains it.

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