Are you sick of hearing about Twitter? I know I am. So here’s a different image, from the movie “A River Runs Through It.” Recall those gorgeous shots where everything is sun-gilded and glowing? The water sparkles. The man (Brad Pitt, as it happens) casts, and the line snakes gracefully into the air and lands delicately on the reflective surface of the river. That’s what we’re doing here. Fly-fishing. Every tweet is  a lure that lands ever so gently on the water. We’re very lucky fisherfolk, too. We reel in a fish, or two or three, or a dozen, every time we send the line out. And the best part: no hours of standing on wet rocks. Just five minutes a day of quick brainwork, and type a few characters.

Here’s how.

1. Sign up for Twitter using a separate account and user name for the site or blog you want to promote.

2. Under the “Settings” link on your new Twitter page, make sure that the box “Protect my updates” (near the bottom of the page) is NOT checked.

3. Open another browser window and sign up for a free account at snipurl. You’re doing this for 2 reasons. Snipurl shortens URLs so they fit easily into a Twitter post, and it also lets you track how many clicks each link gets. You can use this information over time to see what your readers are most interested in, and give them more of it.

4. Decide what page or post on your blog you want to promote. Copy the link, and paste it into snipurl to shorten it (make sure you’re logged in first). Copy the shortened version of the URL and use it in Step 5.

5. In one short sentence, say what the reader will gain or learn from your blog post or web page that will help them in their lives or business.

The jargon for this is “adding value.” Marketing guru Robert Middleton says this about adding value:

When your focus is the welfare of others, you win every single time. If I write an article or an eZine, if I give a talk, or help a client, if I share a realization or a strategy, it’s all about making a difference….Businesses based on this principle thrive.

Share something with your followers (and anyone else who might search Twitter for information on your topic) that helps them solve the problem your business exists to remedy. Try to use a keyword or two. This one sentence will be your “tweet.”

Do NOT say what you had for breakfast, that you’re on your way to a dentist appointment, or that you’re having trouble finding a parking space! The point here is to give people something useful, helpful or entertaining. Also do not try to hard-sell anything. That’s not the point either.

For example, a useless tweet (for our purposes): “Stuck in traffic in the rain, commuting really sucks.” True, but not helpful.

An obnoxious tweet: “Buy my incredible product X [fill in the blank] now.” Just plain bad sales technique, anyway. (For more on how to identify Twitter spam, check out Bernard Moon’s post at Mashable.)

A tweet that adds value for my audience of business web site owners: “18 reasons to choose WordPress for your blog or non-blog web site, new post at http://sn.im/iaxm3”

6. Type or paste your tweet into the box at the top of your Twitter page where it says “what are you doing.” Add the “snipped” link from step 4. Press the “update” button.

Do this once every weekday. If you temporarily run out of new material to tweet about, link to a helpful, related post on someone else’s blog.

Voila. That’s it. You don’t need to understand Twitter. You don’t need to follow anybody until you want to. And, you don’t need to worry about who’s following you. Just track your site statistics, and watch your traffic stats improve. And enjoy the river.

Two clients came to me recently, wondering why their sites didn’t come up at all in search engines. Both sites were created by the same web designer, and both clients were very pleased with their site’s appearance. But where was their traffic? Why couldn’t they find their own sites on Google, or any other search engine?

If You Build It, They Will Come… NOT!

When I took a look behind the scenes at the actual coding of both sites, I found the culprit. There were no title tags, metatags, alt tags, or keywords. The designer built attractive sites… but by these omissions, guaranteed their invisibility.

I don’t think he meant to cause problems. But he didn’t take the extra step and add in these small things that in today’s competitive environment make such a huge difference to the success or failure of a site to attract business. But who knew? His work was sloppy, yet invisible to anyone who doesn’t know how to read the source code on a web page. It’s as if these web sites had an undetected saboteur who secretly, quietly, and invisibly, sent all their visitors away before they’d even knocked at the door.

Search Engines Look for Text

How do search engines find your site? They look for text. If there’s no text, your site has a hard time being “seen.” Does this mean that sites with images, video, and animations are always invisible? No. But it does mean that you need to use text to describe the contents of your site. And for the text to be effective, you must use it in certain ways, in certain places. Here’s how to do it.

A Simple Search Engine Optimization and Visibility Checklist for You and Your Web Designer

Whether you’re building your own site, or hiring a designer, here’s a list of simple things to check before your site goes live.

1. Domain names count. Try to use your keyword(s) in your domain name (“bluewidgets.com”). If you’ve already got your domain name, don’t worry about this one, just focus on the others.

2. File and image names are even more important. Don’t just name your page files and images “products.html” and “image1.jpg.” Use your keywords! (“bluewidgetstore.html”, “bluewidget1.jpg”.)

3. Do not leave spaces in the name of any file that is used on your site (“bluewidget.html,” or “blue-widget.html” but not “blue widget.html”).

4. Fill in ALL the “image alt” tags with text that uses key words to describe the image (alt=”blue widget 1, frontal photo”). Do this for EVERY image on your site.

5. Super-important: fill in the “Title” tag on all pages! Use descriptive terms that use both the site keywords, and the contents of the page (“Blue Widgets Store – fine-tune your rotilators and improve your flipsacalcs with precision-engineered carbon steel blue widgets”).

6. Fill in the “Description” metatag with a client-centered description of each page. A few search engines will still use this tag on their results page (“Fine-tune your rotilators! Precision blue widgets, list of all sizes in stock”).

7. Fill in the “Keywords” metatag with a list, from most important to least important, of your page’s keywords. Although these are not so important anymore, it won’t hurt, and it may help, to have them. Important tip: don’t bother putting any keyword in this tag that doesn’t actually already appear on the page. So, if you don’t have a widget named “Famous Blue Widget” on this page, don’t put the word “famous” in the metatags just because you think it might help. It won’t!

8. Internal navigation—is it done with images, or with text? If your navigation links are actually images, be sure to put a redundant set of text-based navigation links on the page as well. Often, the footer is a good place for these.

9. Use link titles, and put page keywords in them!

10. Very important: instead just using bold text, or a larger font size, for headings, use the “h1″ and “h2″ tags. Try to put keywords in these headings.

11. Avoid Flash navigation! (Ask your designer.)

You and your designer don’t have to be rocket scientists or search engine pros to do this simple search engine optimization. Does it sound like extra work? Yes, a little. But it makes a huge difference in how many people actually find you. And it takes much less time to add these touches when you’re building the site than it does to go back and add them later.

Don’t sabotage your own traffic! Be visible! Make sure the invisible, behind-the-scenes code in your site is ready, and welcoming, to those search bots.

Has a site you’ve owned suffered from ISWD (Invisible Sloppy Web Design)? Have you fixed one yourself, or had to hire someone to do it for you? Join the discussion.