New-Site SEO Basics: Get These Right First

When a new site launches, bosses love asking “how do we do SEO.” Cold water first: SEO has no magic button — it's all fundamentals. This lists the things a new site should get right. Get them right, then hand the rest to time and content.

sitemap and robots: telling search engines what pages you have

sitemap.xml is your site's page inventory; robots.txt tells search engines what to crawl and what to leave alone. Both are generated dynamically on this site — template landing pages and blog posts enter the sitemap automatically after publishing, no manual upkeep. If your site is hand-written, update the sitemap every time you add a batch of pages. Don't get robots wrong — one line of “Disallow: /” wipes the whole site from results; read it three times before changing.

One h1 per page, don't skip levels

Each page gets exactly one h1 (one sentence saying what the page is for), then h2 and h3 for sections in order — never jump from h1 straight to h4. Titles are written for humans; include the words users search along the way, but don't pile keywords. Search engines, like users, hate clickbait and keyword stuffing.

title and description are written for the search results page

What users see first in search results is your title and description, not the body text. Write each page separately: the title says what the page is, the description says in under 150 characters what you get by clicking in. Don't use one title site-wide — ten pages all called “Home” confuse search engines and users alike.

Images and speed: nobody waits for a slow site

Two things: write alt for images (it's accessibility, and it tells search engines what's in the picture), and don't make above-the-fold images huge. If a site takes over 3 seconds to open, half the users close it, and search engines demote it. Compress images, don't pile big videos above the fold — the effect is immediate.

Submit to Search Console

Verify site ownership in Google Search Console (this site's footer has notes on the verification file — follow them), submit the sitemap, then wait for indexing. Don't check rankings daily on a new site — no indexing in the first two weeks is normal. Search Console shows which queries brought clicks — the only real evidence you have for tuning titles and content.

The biggest SEO trick: keep publishing

Honestly, everything above is just the entry ticket. What really separates sites is consistently producing useful content — like the blog you're reading now. Regularly publishing articles that solve real problems beats every trick. And don't touch the reverse: buying backlinks, scraping and rewriting, keyword stuffing — get caught and you're demoted; not worth it.

How to find keywords: look at the real click queries in Search Console

Don't buy keyword tools, and don't guess “what would users search.” Search Console has a performance report: which queries brought impressions, which brought clicks — that's data users voted on with real money. Focus on two kinds: queries with impressions but no clicks — users found you but didn't click, usually an unappealing title and description, so fix those; and queries with clicks — that path works, so write more related articles around that query and catch the traffic.

On a brand-new site, Search Console may start empty — normal. Write from common sense first: what problem does your product solve? Turn the “problem” itself into articles. If you run a booking system, write “how nail salons save on phone bills with online booking” — users search the problem, not your product name. Long-tail queries have little competition; new sites should take traffic from there first instead of fighting big sites for hot terms.

How to write titles: for humans first, search engines second

The title is the only thing users decide on in search results. The formula: the first half says what the page does, the second half carries the words users search. Like “Online Booking System: Three Settings That Save Nail Salons Phone Bills” — humans get it, keywords included. Don't stuff keywords: a title like “booking system, booking software, online booking, booking tool” annoys users and search engines can tell. Keep it under 30 Chinese characters — longer ones get cut off in results.

How to do internal links: articles should visit each other

Internal links are links from your own articles to your own other pages. They tell search engines “these pages are related,” and authority flows between them. It's simple: when writing, link over whenever you mention a related concept, using descriptive text as the anchor — never “click here.” Two to five internal links in a 2,000-word article is enough; more looks like a spam site.

One more habit: every time you publish, look back at old articles for places that could link to it and add one or two. New articles are starved for authority at birth; old articles giving them a lift speeds up indexing a lot. And the new article can link back to the old classics, keeping readers around for a few more articles.

Published but not indexed: don't panic, check in this order

• ·Confirm in Search Console that the sitemap was submitted and the article URL is in it
• ·Use “URL inspection” to manually request indexing — no more than a dozen a day, more doesn't help
• ·Check that robots.txt isn't blocking this batch of pages; read it three times before changing, house rule
• ·Look at the content itself: is it too thin, is it too similar to others' — search engines don't index pages with no informational value

No indexing two or three weeks after publishing on a new site is totally normal. Search engines put new sites in an observation period — don't submit daily, don't keep changing things; frequent changes make it re-evaluate. The right posture: publish steadily every week, leave old articles alone, let time work. Come back in three months — indexing and rankings will be there.

Old articles need maintenance too

Publishing isn't the end of it. Come back after half a year: update stale data, add internal links when new articles come out, rewrite titles that underperform in Search Console. Search engines like “living” pages — an article untouched for three years slowly drops in ranking. Maintaining old articles has a better return than writing new ones, because they already rank — one push is all they need.

Three things to never touch

• ·Buying backlinks: get caught and you're demoted; appealing takes months — not worth it
• ·Scraping and rewriting: duplicate content doesn't index — a wasted effort
• ·Keyword stuffing: ten keywords in a title — users and search engines both see through it

URL structure: short, stable, with keywords

Don't use ?id=123-style article URLs — use semantic slugs like /blog/free-tools-indie-dev so anyone can tell what the page is about. Once a URL is set, don't change it — one change breaks all old links and resets authority to zero. If you must change, 301-redirect to the new address. URLs are the site's street numbers — every move makes search engines and users re-learn the way.

Image SEO: filenames and alt

Don't name image files IMG_2026.jpg — rename them to English descriptions like free-tools-dashboard.png; write alt text saying what's in the image. Image search is a traffic source too — some people arrive through image results. Do both when uploading images; batch-renaming afterward is painful. alt has one more job: when an image fails to load, users see the text description instead of being confused.

Mobile: Google looks at the phone version first

Google now does mobile-first indexing: it looks at your mobile version first, and a bad mobile version wastes even a great desktop one. Click through your site on a phone yourself: is the text big enough, are buttons tappable, do tables break the layout? Fix anywhere that feels awkward on mobile. Most of your users are on phones — the mobile experience is the whole experience.

Structured data: make search results prettier

Add Article structured data to article pages and FAQ to pages with Q&A — search engines then show rich snippets: star ratings, expandable Q&A, breadcrumbs. Rich snippets don't directly boost ranking, but they raise click-through a notch — of two results in tenth place, the one with the rich snippet stands out. That's free click-through: spend an afternoon adding it once and it's done forever.

Backlinks: don't buy them, but you can earn them

Buying backlinks is a red line, but natural backlinks are good — how do you earn them? Write content worth citing: data, tutorials, pitfall logs — others will naturally link you when they write. Submit to vertical communities and media outlets, with a link in the byline — that's a legitimate backlink. For link exchanges, judge quality not quantity: one good site in a related industry beats a hundred junk sites. Backlinks are the “votes” search engines count — vote quality beats vote count.

404 pages: don't waste them

Deleted pages and changed URLs greet visitors with a 404. A default 404 page is just shooing users away — make your own: apologize, add a search box, recommend a few popular articles. While you're at it, check Search Console for the most-hit 404s and 301-redirect the important ones. Handled well, a 404 page wins back half the users you'd have lost.