What are your marketing strategies

Do you have local business sites, or do you have more global ones? Do you advertise on Facebook, Twitter, Google? Do you add special tags to your theme templates to improve your ranking?

"Have good content on your site" is true, but it's not what I'm looking for here. What are your smart ways to promote sites you have built?

When a client asks this question, this is how I start, if I haven't already brought it up -

This varies for every organization. To begin with - what are the goals of the organization? Are they in business to sell products or services? What is the target audience? What makes your products or services unique? How will you delight your customers?

The first thing every organization needs to quickly gain control of is their brand - especially their name. If someone searches for your name, your website better come up as the #1 result. Apart from the on-page text, the domain name is critical (stating the obvious).

You also need to own every possible piece of social real estate for your name - Facebook page, Twitter account, Pinterest business account, Google+ business page, LinkedIn business page, Bing Local, Yahoo! Local, FourSquare, and others. This isn't only for ownership and control, it is also for gaining authority and reputation online.

Use valid HTML/CSS/JS, unique page titles, proper redirects and handling of 404 errors, reduce crawl errors and page loading. Visitors and search engines like this.

Special tags (attributes, really): rel=author, rel=me

When a client asks this question, this is how I start, if I haven't already brought it up -

,,,,^_^

Email newsletter is a great way to bring people back to the site, get a big traffic spike for 2-3 days afterwards.

I only use voluntary newsletter sign ups with double opt in policy. Back end I use yourmailinglistprovider.com, its pretty cheap.

I also have a policy of give before take. If you want people to sign up to a newsletter it helps a lot if you give them something for free (eg. an electronic publication).