What steps do you take for new sites?

[MarkB]

I'm interested in seeing the exact steps you all take when beginning to promote a new site.

What do you do first? Google submission, or backlink building?

What are your processes?

How do some of you get hundreds of visitors a day in your first few months?

I'm out of my depth, mainly because the main sites I've run over the last 3 years had immediate audiences with no backlinks or SEO. It's only in the last few months that I've realised the important of SEO for new content sites. So direct examples from all of you (as we're all different:)) will be a great help!

Ever struggling,
Mark

[chromate]

Well... I always start by submitting the main sections of my sites to google (not just the front page). I submit to directories whilst I have no advertisements running on the pages and no affiliate links. A link from a directory at the start of a site's life is gold. I'll then try and get a few easy backlinks from sites that I think are likely to do exchanges with a PR 0 site. The wait for google to display your PR. and continue to build links after that (it should get easier, the more PR you have).

No great secret really. Just work and getting backlinks and submit to google regularly and the directories.

[Chris]

I do pretty much the same thing as Chromate.

[MarkB]

What directories do you guys approach as a priority, other than Dmoz? I imagine there'll be additional ones depending on the topic, though :)

Is Yahoo still available for free listings? I haven't submitted a site to their directory for well over a year (and it seems they have buried it on their site as well...)

[Chris]

Zeal, Yahoo, DMOZ, Joeant, GoGuides, there are some smaller niche ones too.

[MarkB]

Thanks Chris.

Thanks Chromate.

:)

I'm still interested in other people's methods, btw ;)

[incka]

I submit main page to google, add site to sigs, get backward links from other sites, submit to DMOZ and Zeal, get more backward links from similar sites, submit all pages to google once the spider visits the homepage (this method gets the rest of the site cached within an hour, or at least it does for me), then sit back, talk on here, once I have some PR get angry I don't have more, get more backward links, submit to more directories, and the cycle continues. The circle of web developing life.