Launching a Side Project? Don't Skip the SEO Basics

You've just shipped a side project. Maybe it's a SaaS tool, a portfolio site, or a small utility. You share it on Twitter, post to a few communities, and wait.

A week later, you Google your project name. Nothing. Your site isn't showing up.

What happened? Probably nothing dramatic—you just skipped some basic setup that makes your site discoverable. The good news: this stuff takes maybe 30 minutes to fix.

Why New Sites Get Ignored

Google doesn't automatically know your site exists. It discovers new sites by:

1. Following links from other sites
2. Reading sitemaps submitted through Search Console
3. Crawling sites you manually request to be indexed

If nobody links to you yet (common for new projects), and you haven't set up a sitemap or submitted your site, you might be waiting a long time to appear in search results.

The Minimum Viable SEO Setup

Here's the quick checklist for any new project:

Step 1: Create a robots.txt file

Put this at yoursite.com/robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

This tells search engines they can crawl everything and where to find your sitemap.

Step 2: Generate a sitemap

Most frameworks have sitemap plugins. If not, manually create a sitemap.xml listing your main URLs. This isn't strictly required, but it helps Google find all your pages.

Step 3: Add meta tags to every page

At minimum, every page needs:

• A unique, descriptive <title> tag
• A <meta name="description"> that summarizes the page
• Open Graph tags so social shares look good

This takes a few minutes with a generator tool.

Step 4: Set up Google Search Console

Go to search.google.com/search-console, add your site, verify ownership. This lets you:

• Submit your sitemap directly to Google
• See which queries bring traffic
• Check for crawling errors

Step 5: Add basic structured data (optional but nice)

If your site has a clear type—a software product, a blog, a local business—adding Schema markup can help you stand out in search results with rich snippets.

What You Can Skip

For a side project, don't worry about:

• Link building campaigns
• Keyword research tools
• Content calendars
• SEO audits

Use that energy to improve the product. If your project solves a real problem, word of mouth and organic discovery will do more than any optimization trick.

The Long Game

SEO for side projects is really about not shooting yourself in the foot. Set up the basics so Google can find and understand your site. Then focus on building something people actually want to use.

When someone searches for the problem your project solves, you want to show up. That starts with making sure you're not invisible.