Starter Kit
SEO Starter Kit
A beginner's guide to SEO for a new website — how search works, the technical floor, keywords and content, backlinks and authority, and how to measure what moves.
Consider this SEO 101 for developers: the shortest version of the whole discipline that is still true. Search is a three-stage pipeline — Google discovers pages through links and sitemaps (crawl), stores a parsed copy (index), and ranks that index on relevance and authority when someone searches. Every SEO decision fits one of those three stages, and the first stage is the only one a developer controls completely.
How search actually works
Google is a recommendation engine that ranks pages on two axes: how well the page answers the query (relevance) and how much the rest of the web vouches for it (authority). The technical work you do as a developer — making sure Google can crawl, read, and understand your pages — sits upstream of both.
The three levers
Technical — can Google read it? Sitemaps, robots, metadata, structured data, share cards. This is the part a developer gets right in an afternoon. Content — is it the best answer? Keyword research, search intent, writing the single best page for one query. Links — does the web vouch for it? Guest posts, directories, digital PR, profiles on high-authority platforms.
You control the first two directly; the third is a consequence of doing them well. Spend the time accordingly.
The technical floor
The crawlability floor is a handful of files. Ship them once and never think about them again. We deliberately left the code out of this starter kit — when you are ready to ship, paste the snippets from the platform docs into a fresh project.
The six files
- Sitemap. One canonical URL per line. Never list filtered or duplicated pages — the sitemap tells Google what to index, and a noisy sitemap gets you indexed for the wrong things.
- robots.txt. Tell crawlers what they may fetch and where the sitemap lives.
- Title, description, canonical. What a searcher actually reads, and the URL you want Google to use as the source of truth.
- Structured data. JSON-LD that describes what a page is. Only markup what is real — a fabricated rating in markup is a manual action waiting to happen.
- Share cards. The og image that turns a bare URL into a preview. Auto-generated from a per-route file in most modern frameworks.
- Favicon. The only asset that shows in the tab, the SERP, and a bookmark at the same time.
When you are ready to ship these, the platform docs have copyable snippets for every framework. Start with sitemap and robots — they are the highest-leverage two.
Keywords and content
The floor gets you indexable. Content gets you ranked. This is the part that is a skill, not a file — which is why the next two modules send you out to actually read and watch things rather than copy more snippets.
Find a query you can win
Keyword research is finding queries with real search volume that a new site can plausibly rank for. Early on, favour specific, lower-competition queries over broad head terms you will never crack. Look at who currently ranks and ask whether you could write a genuinely better answer.
Match the intent
Every query has an intent — learn, compare, buy, or do. The current results tell you the format and depth it rewards. Match it before you write a word.
Write the single best answer
Content that ranks is the best answer on the internet for one specific query — clearer, more complete, more current than what is already there. One excellent page beats ten thin ones.
Where to actually learn this: Learning Resources for SEO.
Links and authority
A link from another site is a vote. Google treats links from relevant, trusted sites as the strongest authority signal — which is why great content on an unknown domain still struggles until someone links to it.
The cold-start problem
Your first domain has no backlinks, so Google has no reason to trust it. The way out is to earn links from places that already have authority — not by spamming comment sections, but by showing up where your audience already is, with a real profile and real content. The whole list of high-authority platforms you can submit to is in the next page.
See: Backlinks Cold-Start List — 90+ platforms, sorted by Authority Score.
Measure and iterate
SEO is a compounding loop, not a launch task. This is how you see whether it is working and what to do next.
Set up Search Console
Google Search Console is the one non-negotiable tool. Verify your site, submit the sitemap, and check it weekly. It shows which queries you appear for, your click-through rate, and any indexing or structured-data errors.
Read the data, then iterate
After a few weeks, sort your queries by impressions. Pick the pages with impressions but few clicks and improve the title and description. Pick the pages with impressions but no clicks at all and improve the content. Double down on whatever starts to win.
The honest loop: ship a page, watch Search Console, improve the page, watch again. The compounding is in the loop, not in any single piece.
SEO basics FAQ
- What is a SERP?
- The Search Engine Results Page — what you see after you search. For any query it is usually a few paid ads, then the organic results (the ones SEO competes for), often with feature snippets, People Also Ask boxes, or an AI answer above them. Ranking "number one" means the top organic position, which may sit well below the fold when the SERP is crowded with features.
- Is SEO hard to learn?
- The fundamentals are not — most of what a developer needs (crawlability, metadata, structured data, sitemaps) is learnable in an afternoon, and this kit covers it. What takes time is the craft: keyword research judgement, writing content that actually answers a query, and earning links. Expect months of practice before you can predict what will rank.
- What to do after keyword research?
- Map each keyword to one page — if two keywords mean the same thing, they share a page; if they need different answers, they get separate pages. Then check search intent: search the keyword and see what format currently ranks. Only then write the page, matching that format and depth, and add it to your sitemap. One keyword per page, one page at a time.