SEO basics every side project should get right in the first week

A friend messaged me two weeks after launching her side project: three hundred signups from a Product Hunt post, then almost nothing. Search traffic was nine visits a week, mostly her own. We spent an evening going through the site together, and every single fix fit on a napkin. None of it was clever. All of it mattered.

Step 1: titles that describe, not decorate

Her homepage title tag was just the product name. Nothing else. We rewrote it to name the actual thing the product does, in plain words, under 60 characters, with the strongest keyword near the front. That one change alone is usually worth more than everything else on this list combined, because the title tag is doing double duty: it's a ranking signal and it's the blue link people decide whether to click.

Step 2: let crawlers in the front door

There was no sitemap.xml and no robots.txt. Both took about ten minutes to generate and upload. We submitted the sitemap through Google Search Console the same night. Within four days, Search Console showed pages moving from "Discovered - currently not indexed" to "Indexed" — a status you can watch update in near real time once you're registered.

Step 3: one H1, a real outline underneath it

The pricing page had three H1 tags because a previous contractor used heading tags purely for font size. We fixed the hierarchy: one H1 per page, H2s for each major section, H3s for subsections. This sounds pedantic but it's how both screen readers and search engines build a mental map of a page's content.

Step 4: images that say something

Fourteen images, zero alt text. We added real descriptions — not "screenshot1.png" but "dashboard view showing weekly expense totals by category" — which helped accessibility immediately and gave Google's image search something to index.

Step 5: make the page actually load

PageSpeed Insights flagged a 4.2MB hero image being displayed at 800 pixels wide. We ran it through a browser-based image compressor, dropped it to 180KB with no visible quality loss, and the Largest Contentful Paint time fell from 3.9 seconds to 1.1 seconds on a throttled connection.

Step 6: write more, not less

The About section was 60 words. We expanded it to roughly 450 words explaining who the tool is for, what problem it solves, and how it differs from two named competitors. Thin pages rarely outrank pages that actually answer the reader's question in depth — this isn't a trick, it's just what "helpful content" means in practice.

Step 7: canonical tags and social previews

The site was reachable at four different URL variants (www and non-www, with and without trailing slash) with no canonical tag, splitting whatever authority it had. We added one canonical link per page and Open Graph tags so shared links would show a real title, description, and image instead of a bare URL.

Step 8: broken internal links from the redesign

Buried in the site's footer, four links still pointed at a /old-pricing/ path from a redesign three months earlier, each returning a 404. Search Console's Pages report listed them under "Not found (404)" with crawl dates from the same week. We fixed the anchors to point at the current pricing page and set up a couple of 301 redirects on the old paths for anyone landing there from an old bookmark or a stale external link.

Step 9: a blog category page indexed with zero unique content

The /blog/tag/updates/ page just repeated the same excerpts shown on the homepage, word for word, with no unique framing. We either needed to write a short unique intro for the tag page or noindex it, and chose the noindex route since there wasn't enough material yet to justify a standalone page worth ranking.

The tool she leaned on the most

Search Console did more work than any paid tool in this process the Coverage report showed exactly which pages were indexed, excluded, or erroring, and the Performance report showed which queries were already getting impressions but a low click-through rate, which pointed us straight at which titles needed rewriting first.

What happened next

Six weeks later, organic sessions were up to roughly 340 a week, mostly long-tail queries matching the expanded About copy and two blog posts she wrote afterward. None of this required backlinks, guest posts, or paid promotion — just fixing the fundamentals that a rushed launch usually skips.

Step 10: duplicate meta descriptions across forty pages

A templated product-listing section had generated the exact same 155-character meta description for 40 separate pages, because the template pulled a generic category blurb instead of anything product-specific. We spotted the pattern by exporting all indexed URLs and their descriptions into a spreadsheet and sorting for exact matches. We wrote a five-line template that pulled the product name and one spec into the description automatically, which took an afternoon and fixed all forty pages at once instead of forty separate manual edits.

A redirect chain nobody noticed for a year

Digging through the server logs turned up something odd: the homepage was redirecting through three separate hops before landing on the final HTTPS URL, a leftover from three separate domain migrations stacked on top of each other over two years. Each extra hop adds latency and occasionally confuses crawlers about which URL to actually index. Collapsing all three redirects into one direct 301 from the original domain straight to the final URL shaved roughly 400 milliseconds off the very first request of every visit, before a single byte of the page itself had even loaded.

Questions I get asked a lot

How long before SEO fixes like these show results? Indexing changes can appear within days, but meaningful ranking movement for competitive terms usually takes four to twelve weeks.

Do I need a sitemap if my site only has ten pages? Yes — it costs nothing to generate and it removes any ambiguity about which pages you want crawled, even on small sites.

Should I worry about keyword density? Not as a target number; write naturally and use the terms your users actually search for a handful of times where they fit, then stop thinking about it.

What's the single highest-leverage fix for a brand-new site? Writing genuinely substantial content on your most important pages — it affects rankings, click-through rate, and how confidently visitors trust the product.