SEO for a brand new website, in the order that matters
Every checklist has forty items and no order, and you have time for four of them.
Serve real HTML before anything else
If your content only exists after JavaScript runs, you have staked your acquisition channel on a second-class crawl path. Static or server-rendered pages are the single highest-leverage decision available at the start, and the hardest to retrofit.
Build one page per job, not one page about everything
A page that answers one specific query beats a general page that mentions it. If your product does twelve distinct things, that is twelve pages, and each is an entry point that works while you sleep.
Register everywhere on day one
Google Search Console and the second engine, both, immediately. Registration is free, takes an hour, and the second engine delivered roughly a fifth of the first's clicks on this site.
Build the thing people will link to first
A new site's binding constraint is not content, it is that nothing points at it. Content does not solve that, because nobody links to an article that already exists in forty versions. Something usable does: a tool, a dataset, a calculator, anything that is easier to link to than to rebuild. This site earned 122 linking sites, and the tools did nearly all of that work.
The order that worked
One genuinely useful page, indexed and internally linked. Then the supporting pages that make it findable. Then the writing, which is what most people start with and what compounds slowest. Reversing that order is the single most common way a good new site spends a year producing nothing.
Measured, not asserted
160 pages, 42,320 clicks and 100,542 users in 224 days, from a site that was static from the first commit and registered on both engines before it had any content worth crawling.
Free tool for this: SERP Audit. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 10 and Chapter 6 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.