Using Facebook to spread the message about your blog or online project can be very effective if you have a lot of visitors to your profile, it is best to create a Facebook fan page linked on your profile that is dedicated to your website and then you can gain more visitors that way with the visitors to your Facebook profile seeing the link to the fan page and they might follow the link and follow your page or click one of the links to your website if they see an interesting story. I have set one up and I just need to find a working WordPress plugin to automatically post my article links to Facebook, as that is a good way of building links back to your website, which is one of the keystones of building up a good Google ranking. Wordbook is not working with my other plugins and I need to find another one that is more compatible, although if I can get my postings linked on Twitter then I can set up cross posting to Facebook easily.
Using Twitter is another good solution, Attracta.com can help with this, I use the Google SEO tools in my Cpanel my hosting provider supplies and I have added my Twitter user-name to it as well as the URL of my Facebook fan page. You could even post updates on your main Facebook profile, then all of your friends will see the post and will definitely click that link if they are interested in what you have to say. Commenting on other blogs is another way to get clicks on a link straight back to your website that will be very helpful when someone visits that website and clicks the link. Posting a message to twitter for every story you post is a good way to get many hits to your website as the Twitter audience is huge and many people are sure to see the link and click it to visit your post and see what you have to say. Regularly updating your sitemap and submitting it to all the major search engines is another way to gain a good search engine ranking. This must be done at least once a month maybe twice a month if you are updating your website on a regular schedule.
But the best way to get a good search engine ranking is to create a lot of good content and update your website very often. Then you will get a lot of return visits and loyal readers. They might even subscribe to your RSS feeds and be easily updated on your latest posts. Link building is another part of good SEO practice, as commenting on another blog that uses WordPress will give you a link back to your website and if they post something about your posting on their website then you will get a Trackback that will help your ranking as well. If you get a link to your website from a site with a very high Google ranking then you will gain from that, so commenting on other blogs and posting your link around the Internet to get your website noticed is very important. One more way to get you website linked is to set your profile on a message board you frequent to include your website URL, so that when you make a post, your homepage link will be there as well. If you are signed up with Slashdot and set this in your profile then you will have them linking back to you. Any way you can post your weblink around and get noticed is going to help you in your quest for a good search engine ranking.
Google webmaster tools is another way to analyse your visitors and see what is most popular on your website. I find it very useful for tracking what search topics are bringing the most visitors, and you can see how many impressions the search term got versus how many clicks on Google for your website link in the search results. This is very useful for analysing what search terms are actually bringing visitors to your website, therefore allowing you to see what topics you should be targeting for more traffic and potentially more ad revenue. This will help greatly if you want to monetise your website. One change I made for the better on my website is disabling the WordPress ad plugins and using boxes on my site that can hold custom HTML to place my ads, that way I have more control over what ads are on my website and I am not including ads within my posts, which was probably annoying some people. A couple of ads are fine, but do not overdo it.