The web is awash with people claiming to be “social media experts” and “SEO consultants”. Their advice in my experience ranges from the unhelpful through the inaccurate all the way to the positively counter-productive. Many of them are snake-oil merchants who want to charge thousands of dollars to dispense obvious advice or to use shady techniques that will get your site blacklisted by the search engines for spam.

So here is my own obvious advice, for free. My credentials are more than a decade’s experience building websites large and small and a working knowledge of modern search engines*, but much more importantly that, I am not trying to get you to pay me.

For the sake of this discussion I am assuming you are a low- or zero-budget site; if you have a lot of money just buy an ad during the superbowl.

In short, there are three really good ways to make your website popular:

1. making it easy to find your site using a search engine (a process called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO)
2. interacting directly with potential users on social networks and other websites that allow person-to-person communication (known as Social Media Optimization, or SMO)
3. organic growth (also known as Being Awesome)

Let’s tackle these in turn.

Search Engine Optimization

There are two facets to SEO: I have previously covered making it easy for the software used by search engines to understand your website. The other facet, and by far the more important one, is improving your inbound links.

By far the best way to get traffic to your site is to get other sites on the same topic to link to you. It gets traffic directly — by visitors on those sites clicking the links — and it also gets you placed higher in search results. No amount of tweaking and fiddling will get around this fundamental fact: Google (and all other major search engines) decides how relevant your site is by how many other people link to it, and how relevant they are. So the best place to promote your website is on other websites about the same topic. But it’s important to do this in a friendly, respectful and above all non-spammy way. “Non-spammy” is tricky, but some good guidelines are: not too often, not too fast, not to too many people at the same time, and not to an audience that won’t appreciate it.

Getting links to your site

1. Just ask. Find sites on similar topics and drop the owner an email asking if they’ll link to you. Offer to link back to them in return; this makes you both look better in the eyes search engines. If they refuse, that’s fine — move on, and don’t be pushy. Remember to contact each site individually — a mass email to fifty website owners is going to get flagged as spam, because it is.
2. Forums. Find places where people are talking about the subject of your site, and join in. Ideally, find a conversation where you can contribute something genuinely valuable to the conversation, and mention the name of your site or a link to it from there. Don’t be coy about what you’re doing — people know spam when they see it. “I hope
   you don’t mind a little plug, but I have a site about this topic,” is acceptable. Do NOT just join a site, post a single message about your website, and then leave — that’s just spam.

   Some forums also have a “signature” that you can append to your messages, and it is sometimes considered acceptable to include a plug to your own site in there — but be careful, as other sites will consider it spam. As usual, the key is spending some time and getting to know the culture of the site.

3. Paid links. Unlike the other two this costs money, but can also be very effective. Find a highly-rated site and pay them to link to you (it’s best practice that they make it clear that it’s a paid link). Lots of smaller sites are happy to do this and even happier for the revenue, and it can be very cost-effective.

These are simple techniques, and require a lot of time and effort. However, they are also the most powerful. A single link from a popular site can mean thousands of visits, which could cost you hundreds of dollars if you were paying for ads.

Social Media Optimization

The very phrase “social media optimization” reeks of sleaziness. Social media is much harder to get right, but also potentially more powerful: a single well-timed mention of a topical page on your website can go around the world, spreading virally to millions of people in just a few hours.

The two biggest social media channels are Facebook and Twitter, but these techniques can be adapted for almost any website where people have profiles and send messages to each other.

On Facebook

Create a Fan Page for your site. Use it to describe your site, and to mention useful, relevant content from your site. Encourage your existing users to add themselves as fans: that event turns up in their news feeds, which their friends see, and is a great way to spread the word about your site virally. People tend to have friends with similar interests, so the rate of response to a mention in a news feed is much better than an ad, no matter how well targeted.

You can use your fan page to send broadcast messages to your fans (though these are often ignored if they are too frequent, so use them sparingly). You can also post messages to your Wall, which is a great way to keep your page fresh and interesting to new fans.

On Twitter

Create a profile for your site. As with your Facebook Wall, tweet useful information about your topic. Uniquely to Twitter, you can use the ad-hoc conversational dynamic to your advantage: search for your topic, and you will find people talking about it. If you have something useful to add — and only then — you can reply to them publicly (an “@reply”). If they like your tweet, they’ll follow through to your profile and find your site. If it’s particularly helpful, informative or witty, they may even re-tweet your message, sending it out to all their followers.

@replies are really powerful, but again, don’t be spammy: don’t reply to everyone with the same generic tweet, and don’t blindly reply to anybody who mentions your keyword — make sure they’re actually interested in your topic.

Avoid viral gimmicks like “Retweet this to win prizes!” These get you a whole lot of publicity, but at much lower quality: these people aren’t genuinely interested in your topic, they just want your free iPod. You also run the risk of annoying potential users who receive the same tweet from ten different people.

And finally, the most important and powerful technique of all.

Organic Growth, aka Being Awesome

One of the oldest maxims of website promotion is that content is king. The Internet, in all its marvellous chaotic complexity, is really good at surfacing quality content. So make sure your site is well-written, easy to read, and frequently updated. The best way to get popular is to be genuinely useful, informative, or entertaining, and no amount of futzing around with social media is going to get around that

It also helps if your site has a reasonably narrow, defined topic or range of topics — if it’s “my blog about everything” it’s going to be difficult to get anybody but your closest friends to read it, no matter what you do. Work out who you want your audience to be, and then come up with the most useful content you can possibly think of for them. They will reward you with real, long-last reputation and traffic.

* I work for Yahoo!, but not for the search division. I make no claims to any special knowledge about the mechanics of Yahoo search. Even if I did have any knowledge to that effect, sharing it in on a public blog would be severely career-limiting.