How do I do SEO for a brand new site?

What Google says, in its own words

Google Search Essentials has three parts: technical requirements, spam policies and key best practices. It says most sites pass the technical part without realising it.

Google's spam policies say a site that breaks them may rank lower or not appear at all. Three of them describe the shortcuts a founder in a hurry is offered.

What Bing adds

Bing's Webmaster Guidelines cover the same ground. A site that does not follow them may lose visibility or be removed from Bing's index. Bing says it discovers pages through IndexNow, XML sitemaps, crawlable internal links and links from relevant sites. It tells site owners not to block Bingbot in robots.txt and not to hide the main content behind rendering in the browser. Its list of things to avoid includes link buying and private link networks, scraped content, keyword stuffing, and content generated at scale without editorial review. It also says SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic.

IndexNow is a ping a site sends to search engines when a page is added, changed or deleted.

The IndexNow home page names Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as supporters, and the IndexNow FAQ also lists an Amazon endpoint. Google appears on neither list. The FAQ allows up to 10,000 addresses in one request, says to pair IndexNow with a sitemap, and says a submission does not guarantee indexing.

How long it takes, and what nobody promises

That is as far as Google goes. Google's guide to how Search works says it does not guarantee to crawl, index or serve a page, even when the page follows the Essentials. Google's page on hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google. So nobody can honestly give you a date for traffic from search, this page included.

What that means if you have just launched

1. Let the crawlers in. A robots.txt that blocks Googlebot or Bingbot, a page behind a login and a page that returns an error all fail the first test. Search Console is free. Google says you do not need it to be listed, but it is where you see what Google could read.
2. Hand over a sitemap. Google's page on sitemaps says a new site with few links from other sites is one that might need a sitemap, because its crawler finds pages through links on pages it already knows. Submitting one is a hint, not a guarantee.
3. Use the words buyers type. The key best practices in Search Essentials say to put the words people would use to look for your content in the title, the main heading, alt text and link text.
4. Write for the buyer. Google's page on people first content asks whether the audience you already have or intend would find the page useful if they came to you directly. It also says Google has no preferred word count.
5. Tell people it exists. The SEO Starter Guide says Google mostly finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled, and Search Essentials says to be active in communities where you can tell people about your product. Bing says links should be earned through useful content.
6. Skip the shortcuts. Google's spam policies count paying for links, swapping goods or services for links, sending someone a product in return for a write up with a link, and automated link building as link spam. A paid link is allowed when it carries a qualifying attribute (rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored"). Pages for every city or keyword that funnel to one page are doorway abuse, and pages mass produced to rank are scaled content abuse.

The numbers the engines state

Google's few days to a few weeks and IndexNow's days to weeks agree. Neither is a time to rank, and none of these pages gives one.

How Sami uses it

Sami ranks search against the other channels for your product and says why it is in or out. Free methods come before paid ones in the plan, and search is a free one.

Before Sami advises on search it checks the live web, and it can open your own pages, your robots.txt and your sitemap.xml. When a step happens in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, it gives numbered steps and says what to bring back. When the fix is code, Sami writes the instructions for your own coding tool to run.

AskSami never posts anywhere for you, never spends your money and never writes to your code. You do those things yourself. AskSami keeps a dated record of every number, channel and decision you give it, and nothing in it is edited or deleted while the account exists. The setup, step by step, is on the founder's own setup for Google and Bing, and the assistants have their own page, ChatGPT and AI search.