Hey, thanks guys 🙂 I've never really tried to get anyone to read a site I've done before - how do people usually go about doing that? I've been trying to stay active on Twitter (@diedofdysentery) and that seems to be working alright but my promotional strategies are, ah, shallow at the moment.
I'm assuming you're using wordpress. Download one of the SEO packs, make sure that your post structure is SEO friendly (that means, at a minimum, you have yoursite.com/post-name, though most people favor the yoursite.com/category/post-name style). Each page should have several links to other pages on your site. Create a privacy policy and contact us section. Place a link to your root domain in the footer of your website.
I'd also recommend starting a mailing list or something where you can email out monthly updates. That helps keep people coming back.
After that, you need to concentrate on off-site work. Pick several keywords (google keyword tool is helpful as hell) and figure out how competitive they are. Check for how many results google returns, how many backlinks each of your competitors has, and how many occurrences of your keyword are "intitle." Using that information, create a primary keyword and several secondary keywords that you want to rank for.
Begin by commenting on related blogs and using your keywords in the hyperlink back to your page. Try to make this process look natural. You can submit your stories to Digg or Reddit or any of those sites, too. Things like article writing for Ezinearticles can give you quality backlinks and even drive some traffic at your page.
Try link exchanges with other related websites. Try guest posts.
Eventually, you'll want to explore link wheels and things like that. You may also want to eventually outsource some of these tasks.
Basically these are the techniques to fake it until you make it. Eventually, you'd hope, people start reading your site on their own and subscribing to your RSS feed. Once that happens, they'll start posting their own links to it around the web.
Truthfully, ranking a website for many keywords these days (especially the shorter ones like "gaming news" or something) is difficult. You're up against stiff competition and guys who have built thousands of smaller websites to drive their profitable websites up the SERPs rankings. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it means it'll take a lot of work and probably some money.
I'm sure I've left some stuff out, but those are the basics. Good luck!
Edit: Also, keeping adding fresh, unique content!
