1. Register an AWeber account and start your first email list
2. Add an opt-in box to your blog
3. Create a dedicated landing page for your newsletter
4. Giveaway a free report
5. Create a product and promote it using a launch process
6. Recruit affiliates to promote your resources
7. Create a Facebook fan page with an opt-in landing page
8. Build a Twitter following and release great content to encouraging retweets
9. Create a LinkedIn profile and interact in the community to build your network
10. Become a quality user of Digg, StumbleUpon or Delicious to build your reputation power
11. Start a YouTube video marketing campaign to drive traffic back to your blog and newsletter
12. Buy a specific domain name just for branding your videos
13. Encourage word of mouth and viral distribution by creating content that changes your industry
14. Participate in on-topic conversations in leading forums in your industry

So you have had a designer create a logo for you or you can create yourself. For WordPress design, you can either get a free theme or purchase one here. If you are using Thesis theme then this next bit is quite easy. Just click on the name of your theme in the LH menu of your Admin area and you should see [Thesis] Design Options. The screenshot below is from my ProfitHomeBusiness.com site where I use the design options in the admin to control my layout, fonts, etc.

What is a FAVICON ? — check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

Again this is a topic that we could make into a much bigger topic — but we are taking little steps here, you can learn more and improve more another day.

You can also of course get a designer to do this work for you – see Day 3 above

There are dozens of designers that will help to modify or design your site. For those of you who don’t know where to get designers, here’s what you can do.

1. TalkFreelance
2. Sitepoint
3. Digitalpoint
4. WarriorForum.

Or how about a design competition, either at http://99designs.com or http://logomyway.com where you can sometimes get over 500 entries for your contest.

This post is intended to cover the basics of search engine optimization. I’ve tried to include every aspect of it but it’s possible that I missed something. If I have please leave a comment below and I’ll be sure to add anything I have missed.

What is SEO and why is it important?
SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimization. In a nutshell SEO is about helping search engines, like Google, know what your site is about and what keywords you should rank for.

So if your website is about poodle manicures then you want your website to show up in the search results when someone searches for poodle manicures on Google.

By making small changes to your website you can dramatically increase the likelihood that you’ll show up for the search terms you desire in Google and other search engines.

Learn HTML

If you want to optimize your website for the search engines you need to take a couple hours and familiarize yourself with HTML. You don’t need to be an expert you need to understand the basics. If I talk about title tags for image tags you should know what I’m talking about.

Just search Google for HTML tutorials and you’ll find tons of free tutorials.

Blogs make it easy
If you use a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger then much of the search engine optimization is already done for you. This saves you a lot of work and enables you to spend more time developing great content and less time writing HTML for your website.

I recommend that most everyone use a blog for their website. Without that said, it’s still a good idea to learn HTML and understand the basics.

Are You Susceptible to an SEO Scam?
Have you been tricked into forking over hundreds of dollars after being promised a top spot in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs)?

If so, you’re not alone – many online entrepreneurs, in their quest to achieve top ranking, have fallen prey to an SEO scam.

As with any industry, there are search engine optimizers who are honest, and those that aren’t.

How can you spot a fake and save your cold hard cash for other business needs?

First, get rid of your desperation.

Building your search engine optimization isn’t an overnight task and anyone promising that it’s easy is a liar – not someone who has “insider secrets.”

Aside from pie-in-the-sky speed promises, watch out for volume assurances.

If they say they’re going to submit your domain to hundreds or thousands of search engines, you’d better be asking for proof!

Submission to search engines, as any real SEO expert knows, isn’t even a part of the strategy!  You have to optimize your site for ’searchability’ and indexing, not force it on them.

Don’t let anyone guarantee you hundreds or thousands of backlinks in an instant, either!

If they do procure this many, there’s no doubt it will be from back alley virtual spots that Google and other search engines consider dirty – which can hurt your optimization!

Be willing to pay for good optimization – it’s not something a $39 monthly fee can cover.

Demand to know what your money’s paying for (specifically) and if they tout first page pledges for Google – RUN – because nobody can make that claim except Google, and good luck getting them to do that!

Search Engine Optimization and Keywords Overview
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have complex algorithms that decide what pages will come up in search results for a given keywords phrase. We can construct content pages with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind in order to rank high in searches, leading to higher levels of SE (Search Engine) traffic.

Of course several variables are involved in SEO, but let’s talk about what’s important to cover.

Keyword Basics

Your website is most likely about a particular topic (e.g. golf swings, poodle manicures, etc.) and so the first thing to do is determine which keywords best describe the content on your page. Try to think of phrases that are specific.

It’s important that Google’s crawler realizes that your website is about the keywords you have chosen. Google does a pretty good job of determining the topic of your site but there a few things you can do assist Google’s crawler to make sure it gets things right.

Let’s say I have a website called “All things Poodles”. My keyword list would be short, only having one keyword: Poodles

My website has 4 pages:
Poodles Home
Poodle Manicures
Poodle Puppies
Poodle Breeders

Once you have a list of keywords you need to do a little research to find out who you are competing with for each keyword.

For the keyword poodle manicure I would do a search on Google and record how many pages are competing. This tells me how many

pages have my keyword phrase with the words in any order.

Then I would do a phrase match search by searching on Google for “poodle manicure”. This tells me how many pages have the exact phrase.

Then I would do a title search by searching on Google for allintitle:poodle manicure. This tells me how many pages have my keyword phrase in their title.

Then I would do a url search by searching on Google for allinurl:poodle manicure. This tells me how many pages have my keyword phrase in their url.

Note: To learn more about allintitle, allinurl, and other useful operators:

http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

I would do the same thing for the keyword phrases: poodle puppies and poodle breeders.

My table would look something like this:

Looking at the table above it’s clear that there is little competition for poodle manicure and a lot more competition for poodle puppies.

Optimizing your Page

Once you have your list of keywords and know a little about your competition it’s time to optimize.

Put your main keywords that describe your site in the title tag on every page.

Home

<title>Poodles | Poodles Home</title>

Poodle Manicures

<title>Poodles | Poodle Manicures</title>

Poodle Puppies

<title>Poodles | Poodle Puppies</title>

Poodle Breeders

<title>Poodles | Poodle Breeders</title>

You want your most important keywords to appear in the title with as few other characters as possible.

Do not put your keyword in the title more than 2 or 3 times. Google sees this as keyword spamming and will rank your site lower.

On each page put your main keywords in an h1 tag.

On my Poodle Manicures page you would see:

<h1>Poodle Manicures </h1>

Please note I would not target the keyword dog on my Poodle Manicures page because there are 420 million pages related to the word dog and the vast majority of people searching for dog are not looking for Poodle manicure.

There are 15,000 pages competing for poodle manicures and only 8 pages competing for “poodle manicure”.

H1 tags are reserved for top level headlines on a page. You should only use 1 or 2 top level headlines (h1 tags) on your page.

Further discussion on h1 tags:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002429.html

It’s also a good idea to use h2 and h3 tags where appropriate.

Adding an alt attribute to your image tag can help as well as having your keywords be in the file name. On my Poodle manicure page I would have:

<img src=”poodle-manicures.jpg” alt=”poodle manicures” />

Read more about images and SEO

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/03/12/formatting-images-for-seo/

I also like to put one of my keywords at the bottom of my page. This way crawlers find my important keywords at the top of my page and at the very end of the page.

It helps to have your keyword phrase in your domain name and in the file name of your page. For my Poodle Manicures page the ideal url would be http://www.Poodles.com/PoodleManicures.html

Using Robots.txt

One simple thing you can do help to website crawlers crawl your site is have a robots.txt file. This is especially important if you have sections of your website you do not want indexed by search engines.

In addition your robots.txt file can store the location of your site’s sitemap, making it easy for crawlers to find and crawl every page on your site.

“The robots exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent

cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is, otherwise, publicly viewable.” – WikiPedia robots.txt files are quite simple and easy to create.

An example robots.txt file:

User-agent: *Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.gzThe first line file “User-agent: *” tells crawlers that any crawler can crawl the site.

The next 2 lines tell crawlers not to crawl anything in the tmp and private folders.

The last line tells the crawler where to find the site’s sitemap.

A robots.txt file is always found in the top level directory on your domain.

Example: http://www.example.com/robot.txt

I used to create my own robots.txt file but I recently found a site that will generate one for me for free:

http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.asp

Read more about robots.txt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

SEO Checklist

Learn the basics of HTML
Choose your keywords
Find what other sites are competing for those keywords
Put keyword phrase in <title></title>, <h1></h1>, and <h2></h2> tags.
Include an image on the page with the file name & the alt attribute containing your keyword phrase
Make sure your keyword phrase is found at the very bottom of your page.
Embed your keyword phrase throughout your page at a rate of 1% to 2%.
Have your keyword phrase in domain and in the page’s file name.
Create your robots.txt file.

Once you have installed your blog you need to choose and install your theme. I personally use KVModus.com, and search for WordPress Themes under the Category drop down option.

Choose the theme of your choice and then to install it, log in to your Wordpress Admin and on the sidebar you should see a tab called appearance, then click Add New Theme. Once there, go to the top and click Upload, find your theme file and click Install Now. To set it as your theme, go to Themes and activate it.

It’s real simple, all you need to do to get your blog online is to buy your domain name, your web hosting, connect them together and then install your blog.

Personal recommendation:

Buy your domain from Namecheap for $9.69/year and you can receive a 10% discount when you use the coupon code: SWITCH2NC

Buy your webhosting from HostGator for as low as $4.95/month and you can get up to 20% off if you sign for at least 2 years.

Once you have done this, login to your Namecheap account and update your nameservers with the ones HostGator gives you. After this all you need to do is the 10 second Wordpress installation from your hosting CPanel.

1. Write and submit articles and press releases to the article directories.

2. Leave comments on other people blogs with a back link to your site.

3. Answer people questions on http://www.answers.yahoo.com.

4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.

5. Submit your sites and products to wiki sites.

6. Advertise your site on free pixel sites.

7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.

8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100s of free blog directories.

9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.

10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.

11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. Its a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.

12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.

13. Submit to picture posts and hot or not sites with your URLs on the pictures.

14. Add a Bookmark this site link to your web pages.

15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.

16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.

17. Make a stamp with your domain, and stamp it on everything

18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.

19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.

20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.

21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.

22. Create a software program and give it away for free.

23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.

24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site. (expired domains)

25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.

26. Print your domain on your shirt.

27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as http://www.MySpace.com.

28. Submit a viral video to http://www.YouTube.com

29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.

30. Find similar sites who want to trade reciprocal links. use http://www.linkpagecreator.com to manage your reciprocal links page

31. Start your own double optin newsletter or ezine.

32. Use a autoresponder to let everyone who emails you know what your site is.

33. Post comments in guest books, and putt your site in the homepage box.

34. Submit porn galleries to tgps.

35. Sell or place classified ads on http://www.eBay.com with a link to your site.

36. Post free classified ads on any of the sites that allow them with a link to your site.

37. Offer a free service, like a free dating site, where you have your advertising banners displayed.

38. Network with other people at seminars or other live events.

39. Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines.

40. Join Google groups, where you can submit your urls in messages

41. Create a free ebook and list in on the Free ebook sites.

42. Answer forum questions related to products you can sell.

43. Do something controversial, so you make the news.

44. Create profiles on dating sites /bebo /facebook etc with links to your products.

45. Add your site to http://www.cbtoplist.com and other similar sites

46. Use a traffic / homepage exchange. http://www.trafficswarm.com

47. Submit videos to tube sites with your urls embedded on them

48. Create and giveaway a product with resell or giveaway rights and include a link to your site in it o others pass it around for you.

49. Create pamphlets advertising your products and leave them in bars.

50. Buy a pair of sandals; get your website engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach, stomp in the mud or play in the snow.