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

You've shipped a side project. Congratulations — that alone puts you ahead of the majority of ideas that never see a live URL. But shipping is only the first half of the story. If nobody can find your project, all that build time compounds into nothing. The good news is that 80% of SEO impact comes from a handful of fundamentals you can knock out in an afternoon. This guide walks through those fundamentals in the order I'd tackle them for a brand-new site.

Start with unique, human-first titles and meta descriptions on every single page. Not one shared template with the site name — actually different, keyword-focused copy per route. The title tag is still one of the strongest ranking signals, and the meta description is what convinces people to click. As a rule of thumb, keep titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 160, put the most important keyword near the front, and never repeat the exact same title across pages.

Next, add a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt. The sitemap tells search engines which pages exist and how often they update. The robots.txt tells crawlers where they're allowed to go. Both are tiny files that take minutes to create, but their absence is one of the most common reasons small sites are under-indexed. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console once your site is live — it's a free tool and it's essential.

Structure your content with real semantic HTML. Every page should have exactly one H1 that describes what the page is about, and H2 and H3 headings that organize the content below it. Search engines read this hierarchy to understand your page. Just as importantly, so do screen readers and users skimming the page. Don't use headings for styling; use them for meaning, and let CSS handle the visual weight.

Add alt text to every image. Not lazy alt text like 'image' or 'photo' — actual descriptions of what the image shows. Alt text does three things at once: it makes your site accessible, it gives search engines context, and it acts as a fallback if the image fails to load. If an image is purely decorative, use an empty alt attribute so it's skipped by screen readers.

Get serious about page speed. Compress your images (a good image compressor can cut JPEG weight by 60% with no visible quality loss), lazy-load anything below the fold, avoid loading enormous JavaScript bundles you don't need, and lean on the browser's built-in caching. Google's Core Web Vitals are now a ranking factor, but even setting SEO aside, a fast site is a better site.

Write real content — and by real, I mean substantial. A landing page with 80 words and a signup form will almost always rank behind a page that actually explains, in depth, what the project does, who it helps, and how it compares to the alternatives. This is the single most under-appreciated SEO lever for side projects. Aim for at least 400–600 words on every important page, and don't fill space with keyword stuffing — write like you're explaining the product to a friend.

Make sure every important page has a canonical URL. If the same content is reachable at multiple URLs (with and without a trailing slash, with query parameters, over HTTP and HTTPS), search engines can split your ranking signal across those variants. A single canonical tag per page tells them which version is the real one.

Add Open Graph and Twitter card tags. These control how your links look when they're shared on social platforms and in messaging apps. A good preview with a title, description, and image gets dramatically more clicks than a raw URL. It's a five-minute change per template that pays off every time someone shares your link.

Consider adding structured data (JSON-LD) for anything that fits a common schema — articles, products, FAQs, breadcrumbs. This is the metadata that unlocks rich results in search: star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, sitelinks, and the like. Google's Rich Results Test will tell you whether your markup is valid.

Now for the ongoing work. Internal linking is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for a growing site. When you publish a new article, link it from related older articles, and link from the new article back to your most important pages. This spreads authority around the site and helps crawlers discover new content faster.

Backlinks — links to your site from other sites — still matter enormously. You don't need to spam anyone. Instead, ship things people actually want to talk about: a genuinely useful tool, a well-researched article, or an original data-backed post. Then share it in the communities where your audience already hangs out. One organic mention in a relevant newsletter often outperforms a hundred generic guest posts.

Finally, measure. Install a lightweight analytics tool (Plausible, Umami, or Google Analytics if you prefer), and check it weekly, not obsessively. Look at which pages get traffic, which search queries bring visitors, and which pages people leave immediately. Every one of those signals is a hint about what to improve next.

SEO for side projects isn't about tricks or shortcuts. It's about doing the boring, obvious basics well: clear titles, real content, fast pages, honest structure, and a link people would actually want to share. Do those consistently for a few months and you'll be surprised how quickly a small project starts showing up in search results.