I have been crating few blogs of my friends and while working on their SEO part, I have noticed that there are few basic steps which every site needs to follow which helps them listing better in search engines, gain exposure and build traffic. I am listing down those steps I follow while working on any new website and hope you will like it as usual and don’t forget to drop in your views, questions and comments about it because it matters a lot to me. Enjoy!
1. Creating a Sitemap
This is the first thing you would want to do after setting up your WordPress, installing themes etc. The sitemap helps search engines recognize the structure of your blog and helps them indexing well. You can use Google XML sitemap plugin to create a sitemap and submit them to Google, Yahoo! and Bing search engines that helps you make your SEO grow better.
2. Setting up Webmasters tools
All the giant in search i.e. Google, Yahoo! and Bing have their own webmaster tool service section which helps you analyze your site position in the web as they give you some important information about your incoming links, outgoing links, malwares, crawl errors, top keywords, site loading time etc.
3. Submission to Internet directories
Submitting to internet directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, Yellow Pages helps you get a quality backlink for your site from a good source and it helps you increase your backlink counts and gain good respect from search engine for your site.
4. Submission to Social Bookmarking sites
This helps you gain exposure for your site, build some quality backlinks and get some fair amount of traffic. You should submit your site pages or articles of your pages to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon etc. As you might notice, I get some good traffic via Stumble Upon.
Read : How to use Stumble Upon to get more traffic for your blog
5. Get a Facebook Fan Page
One of the giant in social networking having over 500 million users from across the world, Facebook is a rich source of traffic and a good platform to get an exposure to your blog, site or business so it is necessary that you build a Fan Page of your site and get people join it.
6. Get a Twitter Account
One of the fastest spreading, real time updating and having most of the reputed people using it, Twitter really has got a caliber to enhance your exposure, get visitors, clients, get feedbacks etc. from it.
7. Spread the Word
Ask your friends to spread the word about your website or a blog and you may even submit your press release to several already established blogs related to your niche and also can ask your fellow blogger friends to write an article about your start-up!
8. Comment on other blogs
Well, this is an excellent way to create backlinks for free which links back to your website/blog. Though there might be some blog having no follow attributes in them but still it is important to keep commenting on the blogs you visit which also helps you to gain traffic and gives you SEO advantages as well.
Well, as many SEO bloggers have said that SEO is not a one time process and you have to keep it fresh every time and keep working for it and try to make it better gradually. Liked the above listed points? I hope you will find them useful for your upcoming website/blog. Do drop in your views!
Thank you matt, nice to have you on the blog. Yes, press release almost always works
Yes, You should use as many social bookmarking sites as you can
These 8 steps are useful and effective for the SEO perspective. Use of social media is very important because you can get traffic and Ranking with the help of Social sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Thanks for sharing excellent points here!
Regards
.Jessica-
SEO Services
My recent post Search Engine Optimization SEO Tools & Techniques
Great Tips!!
I'll follow them as my blog is new.
Hey Plaban! Nice to have you on thecopypasteblog! Glad I could help you
Hope to see you again 
StartupTunes.com is an quality Web2.0 Startup Review Blog. You can also try submitting your startup using their http://startuptunes.com/submit-new-startup/ page. Good luck..
nice post dude
I agree with you, mi site getting too much traffic from stumbleupon. Thanks for your tips.
Really nice post…..:)
After starting up up a website a lot has to be done in order to keep your blog on the top list. This is not an easy task but then it is very doable. Using social media sites to market yourself is a nice idea because of the large number of users on these sites. The other steps you have mentioned are also very important in building a successful blog.
Really great tips to follow after setting up blog/website.There are also many important steps to consider while setting new blog.