OK, you've done your keyword research and found your niche "Lithuanian handmade left-handed bowling balls". So you've registered your domain name - lithuanianhandmadelefthandedbowlingballs.com, created your blog or store or whatever. Everything is "SEO-ready", pages are optimized for your keywords, uploaded to your server, domain is pointing correctly and you're ready to open your doors and welcome the world. What are the first 5-6 steps you take to start trying to drive some traffic to your site? Submit your sitemap to Google? Submit the site to a few top directories? Submit to hundreds/thousands of directories? Start trying to build links through RLE? Create content/articles with links back to you and start submitting those? Buy some links? What are the first and most important steps to get things off on the right track and to begin getting some traffic to your site as quickly as possible?
Really, buy links is the first thing you'd do? Only links above a certain PR or "relevant links only", or just the more the merrier?
I would start with link exchanges in the same niche. and probably some article submissions. Sitemap submission, directory submissions. Well i'd say any of the methods you pointed out are important for a start. I don't think there's a typical route you should follow.
get some inbound links is the most important first step...after that start building the site with quality content.
All the usual stuff: write some content! Then get in-bound links from article submissions, directory submissions, AdWords (or whatever) if you can afford it. I've had great success with press releases but they tend to only work in the short-term. Also set-up a blog about your website. I've had good success with this as well.
I'd go with a little article submission, adwords is great to push traffic to your site. If your publishing anything on your blog that you also submitted as an article be sure to use a robot.txt file to prevent search engines from seeing the duplicate content. John
I don't launch websites, but launch BLOGs .. First, write some great content... second, increase the number of posts.. third, submit to top search engines, (google, yahoo,live) [most of the times, i don't actually submit] fourth, Use my contact/friends on StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites to make it popular. fifth, go to forums, where I am active, and put the link in my signature ... last, get some link-exchanges, with friends,, or even outsiders, if i get any Thats all .. no investment required ...