I’ve always been a big fan of lists because they are clean, concise, helpful and quite often easy to pass on to friends trying to do some of the same things you are trying to do - it short, they are just helpful. So when I received a list of 250 ways to Improve Your Online Presence last night I thought it was only right to repost it, but also to clean it up and shorten it so that it was still helpful but didn’t turn people off with a 10 page list…. So check it out:

1. If you’re launching a new site, or releasing new content, write an introduction and submit it to share sites like Digg, Reddit, Netscape, as well as Now Public. DO NOT SPAM THEM!
   
2. Create a group in the niche your site sits…Yahoo Group or Google Groups are an excellent start.
3. Create a MySpace account and use it to promote your site. Yet again, do not spam, but also target the proper demographics using their search options.
4. Use social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, BlinkList, check out a fellow bloggers article on Easy Social Bookmarks For Your Blog.
5. Technorati is an amazing tool - be sure to create an Technorati account and “claim” your blog as it’s helpful for your rankings, link back tracking, and many other tools.
6. Submit your site to free, search engine friendly directories - especially ones with a higher Google PageRank. An excellent list can be found at VileSilencer’s Site.
7. Conduct a survey of friends and family for a offline test and then check out your demographics online.
8. Place a free ad for your company / site on Gumtree which is very similar to that of CraigsList.
9. Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds which can bring in many more users that just want to see on the fly updates in the feed readers.
10. Submit your RSS feeds to sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, RSS Mad, Feed Directory, Syndic8, feedfury, and 2RSS. There are many more, but these are some of my favorites and some of the top on the internet.
11. Talk to other fellow webmasters in the same niche as yourself and try to get either free linkbacks or Link Exchanges.
12. Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site and give your site a review. I have an article about best ways to optimize your site using StumbleUpon in the very near future.
13. You ever see those annoying 404 Pages and just turn and leave? Make sure to create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nicer or better yet; allows them the option to send you the error so you can fix it.
14. Important error alot make, set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address. Taming The Beast has more info on this subject.
15. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on so that all of your fellow posters can check out site (be sure to check out their sites also).
16. Tell your friends about your site - word of mouth is far to underestimated, especially for a new site.
17. Spell check your site, other wise its just annoying to read most of the time. If it’s a blog, it’s understandable as it’s your own personal writing style, but not on professional sites.
18. Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers including Firefox, IE, Safari, etc. If you need help testing your site - especially on OS X - just drop me a line.
19. Buy enough hosting to support your site. No one likes a slow site or one that goes down after 5 minutes of being on Digg.
20. Don’t worry about your PageRank - worry more about understanding how it works.
21. Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends about free stuff. Try out contests, free link backs, etc.
22. Tell your neighbors, as you never know what contacts they might have just like your friends.
23. Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you such as AIM, MSN, Skype, Yahoo, etc. Be careful to whom you give out Cell Phones (if anyone), but everyone should be able to reach you at one email address at least.
24. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It’s free, relevant and localized if trying to sell a product. You can also target certain demographics of users if your interested.
25. Do NOT use frames as they are outdated and annoying to most users; instead look at using AJAX to display iFrames to keep your site semi-Web 2.0.
26. Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It may take time, but it’s worth it as it’s the largest directory on the internet from the way I understand it.
27. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google. If using Wordpress, check out the Google Sitemap Generator plugin.
28. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often - even better, become a T-Shirt whore and advertise for others often. Makes them feel good too :)
29. Choose the right advertisers and understand why each different advertisers offers something unique for all of it’s advertisers and publishers. Don’t just choose the first one and put all of your eggs in one basket.
30. Sign up with an affiliate program to sell your product if you have one, or if you’re a publisher, make some cash via advertising for others!
31. On your Contact Page, or a specific page, ask people if they mind receiving your newsletter.
32. If they don’t - Then send out a newsletter!
33. Go to a free seminar for Website owners as you will learn something from all of those who have already been in your shoes at one time or another.
34. Find other relevant and insightful blogs in your niche and leave a comment (with a link back to your site of course). Another big thing to do is target those sites with “Top Commentators” plugin because it also is another free linkback.
35. Don’t pay people to submit your site to search engines as it’s a waste of money and something you can do by yourself quite easily and more effectively.
36. YouTube and Google Video are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaigns for millions of users to see everyday. Be sure to tag the videos with proper keywords.
37. Use the Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag all of your posts with your own personal choosing or Yahoo Suggestions to help get search engine optimized as well as proper permalinks in your posts (if a blogger).
38. Sponsor a Wordpress theme or a phpListDirectory template as it’s a free linkback from everyone person using that template if they do not remove your name.
39. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add “As Seen on TV” to your site so that will people will trust your product more (because TV is so reliable and all - haha)!
40. Avoid proprietry technologies like Java and Active X because not everyone is capable of using them nor does everyone want to see them. It goes back to testing your site will all browsers before “going live.”
41. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it’s not manufacturer specific - so mp3 rather than wma. When doing this, also make sure you are not posting anything illegal because your advertisers will take away your income in a heart beat.
42. Learn about CSS as well as PHP and AJAX. Basic HTML is dead, just deal with it.
43. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia as a simple, but helpful, form of marketing.
44. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products and possible give them something in return. Free link backs or prizes are always nifty for getting some attention.
45. Have user friendly page names - most search engines take your title into heavy consideration for your positions.
46. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a “Skip Intro” link because a lot of people don’t like flash, have browsers supporting flash, etc.
47. Tell your local newspaper about your site and what your trying to accomplish. These newspapers are desparate for stories and you may well even get a pic of your ugly picture published and some more publicity for your project.
48. Become a leading authority on your chosen subject and you will gain many link backs and respect from others in the niche.
49. Donate money to a charity and most will place a link on their site back to you because everyone loves someone who gives to charities instead of just being selfish with their money.
50. Abide to W3C standards - it will help your site in the long term and make people think of you as a much better programmer.
51. Your local community sports teams offer cheap, but highly effective sponsorship opportunities if your trying to target the local market.
52. Publisise your site on related forums - but yet again, don’t spam - spam just irritates people.
53. Ask bloggers to write about your site or product - and as always, offer a link back of course.
54. Offer a competition related to something in the news - blogger vs blogger, car video vs car video, articles vs articles, etc. Adding friendly competition between sites is always a fun way to meet new people and share your readers with another blogger and vice versa.
55. Add a “Tell a Friend” function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their buddies, and their buddies recommend to their buddies, etc. Yet again, word of mouth.
56. If your a blogger, speedlink. You read other sites daily, you love other bloggers articles, give them recognition. For an example, check out my Speedlinking on March 3rd.
57. Meta Keywords and Descriptions are as major as they use to be, but it’s always helpful for SEO to have had done them properly in the first place. Check out Google Keyword Suggestions as well as Overture; use them properly and watch your results increase.
58. Include a Feedburner button on your site so people can easily subscribe to your feed and see your current subscription rate - no matter how many or how few - show the number. Showing 1 user in the list will make someone feel bad and sign up - then they will actually read your site. Always target 1 user at a time, it makes life easier and more effective.
59. If you use pay per click, then be sure to then create a landing page for each of your AdWords - it’ll boost your conversations to no end if done properly.
60. Create a Press section on your site where can you store all your press releases, logos and banners so other can help promote you if they so choose. With this, make sure again that you have the server to handle such a request.
61. Add a link to your site from within your eBay profile to get your site out to millions of new targeted users already looking at your product.
62. Update, and update often - without new content, no one is going to come back and advertisers as well as yourself really want to see a good number of returning visitors.
63. The best way to find someone to do any kind of work on your site is through personal recommendation, not just a random pick from a search engine result. Using something like RentACoder is always a good option also if looking for cheap, but excellent work to be done.
64. Gain exposure by submitting photos and pictures to Flickr as well as leaving comments for other Flickr users (not spam).
65. Share your banners on banner exchange sites to gain more publicity without costing you a dime.
66. Make sure it’s easy for your users to subscribe to your RSS feed without having to heavily search. If using Feedburner, as stated above, just simply post your number of subscribers/readers somewhere near the top as this link also provides a link to your feed.
67. Create a “lense” for your site on Squidoo as it’s a huge user submitted site for a “one stop location” style web 2.0 website.
68. Ask friends, family and associates to “Favorite” your blog on Technorati.
69. You can add a Bulletin to your MySpace account promoting your site that all your MySpace Friends will see as well as leaving comments to a targeted demographic. If you don’t want to chance your “primary” account being suspended or deleted, simply create a new account for promotional purposes.
70. Respond to your emails promptly, even if it is with a simply auto-responder as no one likes to wait 3 or 4 days for an acknowledgement of their contact with you. Another quick tip - your readers are important - don’t start arguments with readers.
71. Get a professional Copywriter to give your site a once over and even if you are on a tight budget, limit to the just the homepage. You don’t need to be stealing other people’s work and others don’t need to be stealing yours.
72. Make a list, “Top 10″s work well as well as “segments” you write on during a week, month, etc. Update it regularly to give your visitors a reason to return especially when writing on certain topics with targeted traffic.
73. What did you learn today? Where did you learn it from? Tell other people and they might learn something too and it could provide traffic to a fellow web master also.
74. Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic of more intellectual people over standard spammers as other social news sites like to provide. ;)
75. Deep link directories are an excellent way to promote inner pages of your site - if a blogger, link back to old posts often, use related links plugin, and make sure to not say link with a “Click Here.” Click here does not help your search engine optimization.
76. Google Analytics and 103Bees are both free and will give you detailed stats on who is visiting your sites as well as where they came from, link backs, etc. If you are running a dedicated server, also check out AWSTATS.
77. Search engines will find you and you can easily make them find you quicker with a little bit of work -but don’t ever pay money for your site to be “submitted”.
78. Don’t be afraid to link to other sites, especially if they are relevant and to highly respected sites - A lot of beginners will think this will make them loose traffic and this is completely wrong. Helping others often times means they will help you with links back to your sites.
79. Keep It Simple Stupid: use CSS to control layout, style and colors mixed cleanly with PHP/SQL connections and a little AJAX mixed in here and there for a clean Web 2.0 site. Never user table’d design when you can help it as it’s slow and most people don’t like long load times and CSS is just so much cleaner.
80. Validate your HTML and CSS. It’ll help ensure your site displays well in all browsers when mixed with proper cross platform testing.
81. With clean CSS, small pages sizes and optimised graphics will give your site a user friendly feel and won’t require users to wait around for it to load. This mixed with great content - excellent site. :)
82. If you plan to submit your site to lots of directory or article sites - create an email especially for this task instead of writing it half a million times and then delete it when you’re finished to avoid spam.
83. “Link baiting” means writing some uber amazing article, and hoping that millions of people will find it so awesome they all link back to it which will provide you X number of new readers.
84. If your chosen field is technology related then write a “whitepaper” and release it. Most people think of “whitepaper” as a more intelligently written article than just a normal blog posting.
85. Google receives roughly 50% of all search requests made on the internet with Yahoo at 25% and MSN at just 10% of the market. It’s a good idea to know how much emphasis to put on each search engine to bring in the most traffic from each for your website.
86. Robots.txt play an important role with any site and being indexed by search engines, make sure you have it written properly. WageRank has an excellent Writing Good Robots.txt Article.
87. Anything Free! Free online games, free forum or free chatrooms will give your users a reason to come back to your site in some cases. Over using any of these though can also kill your site - use them properly and effectively.
88. Search out unanswered questions on Yahoo! Answers and add your site as the “Source”. If selling items or reselling items, this is also a good place for dirty tactics. When someone requests info on NetFlix, provide your affiliate link to get them to signup and you make some cash. This is against of terms of service, but you understand what I am getting at.
89. Yahoo are catching up with Google with an excellent set of webmaster tools called Site Explorer. If your like me though and just love Google, check out the Google Web Master Tools.
90. Don’t buy traffic - no matter what they say -it is untargeted and won’t convert and you will have just wasted your money and possibly gone against your advertisers terms of service.

Thats It! 90 Simple and easy to pick up and run with ideas that will help you get your site of the ground and really moving into the Search Engines and gaining more traffic. With my “30 Days to 100 Dollars A Day” coming all through April, I will be expanding on all of these ideas as well as many others, but this is a great overall aspect of whats to come.

Update #1:Â It seems as if the friend of mine that sent the article might have been adding his own files to an already created list over at Search Engine Optimization Expert.

-N