Startup SEO, social marketing & traffic building checklist

I've compiled a kind of SEO, social media and traffic building startup kit... for startups. This assumes you aren't already rich, famous and popular enough to drive huge volumes of traffic with your name alone.

By spending a few hours ensuring that you have everything on this list set up and ready to roll, you can be sure to save yourself much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the weeks, months and years to come.

This list isn't meant to be authoritative. It's the bare minimum you'll need to give your site a fighting chance at building traffic. It's broken up into sections, loosely related by function. I've also added a brief explanation of what what each does and why you need it:

Analytics & Research

• Google analytics - Track and measure traffic patterns on your site. Critical for measuring the results of marketing initiatives
• Google webmasters - Help Google index and crawl your site. Can provide invaluable feedback for website improvements
• Google Keyword tool - Provides Google keyword stats. Important for researching SEO content (requires Adwords account - see below)
• Google alerts - Can be used to see where information or references about your site are cropping up online
• Alexa - Provides website ranking information. Useful for researching other websites' popularity

SEO

• Page title & domain - must be relevant to the content of the site and pages
• META tags - HTML information about your webpages. Important for search engine indexing and human readable search results
• Alt image tags - HTML attribute of web images. Helps search engines to determine the subject of images and aids in SEO
• Keywords and phrases - Gives search engines sentence fragments to associate with your site. Improves SEO keyword rankings
• Good document structure - Correct HTML usage of H1, H2, H3 heading tags (amongst others), with relevant keywords and phrases. Improves keyword SEO rankings
• links - Should contain keywords and phrases that are relevant to the target page

Social

• Social media buttons - Each bit of content should have social integration. Allows your content to be shared; critical for generating social buzz or hype
• Facebook - Major social network (500 million users +). Access personal friends and large communities based on shared interests
• Twitter - Major micro blogging website. Useful for keeping followers updated with latest headlines
• Topulo.us - Socially integrated prediction platform for generating buzz
• LinkedIn - Vast network of business professionals. Important for sharing business related information and making business connections
• Stumbleupon - Large social bookmarking site. Useful for sharing and popularizing content pages
• Digg - Large link sharing community. Useful for sharing news articles

Publicity

• Create your own marketing web pages - Instantly create professional marketing quality landing pages. No experience required.
• Guest blogging - Find quality sites that accept guest posts and write good content for them (make sure you get a backlink)
• Article writing - Show off your knowledge and skills and build a reputation
• Press releases - Attract attention to your business news and developments
• Product reviews - Get a permanent SEO enhanced presence that can be socially integrated to drive traffic and enhance PageRank of individual products
• Website and Webpage reviews - Get fun, insightful, SEO enhanced and socially integrated reviews for your website and webpages
• Make predictions - Create buzz and hype around your insight into the future of your niche. Be sure to share these socially

More

• Google adwords - Pay per click ad campaigns via Google
• Google adsense - Allow Google ads to be shown on your site and generate revenue
• Link building - Gather links to increase your PageRank and traffic