The question I have right now concerns getting the sites started.
the good news is that you're just getting started, so you can do the right things from the start, thus avoiding yourself headaches down the road.
So, start by reading this guide (and implementing the tips within, of course), because site structure is very important nowadays:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/seo-siloing-2023-the-last-siloing-guide-youll-ever-need.1502244/
I just purchased my first 2 domain names ever and am trying to decide what creation platform and hosting service would be best to start with, being a newbie
wordpress is the most popular (and newbie-friendly), so I would start with Wordpress despite of the fact that I've started hating it lately. But, for newbies, it's definitely an easy to use platform.
As for hosting, anything but Godaddy! Actually, there are many other shitty hosts besides Godaddy (Namecheap have gone downhil, too so I would also stay away from NC as well), but Godaddy is... well... the daddy of them all
My sites are hosted with HostKoala which is OK for beginners, I think you can pay $5 or 6 a month with HK, so you can use them. Or look up some deals inside of the marketplace, sometimes you can find insanely good deals like $1 for the first year, etc. Have a look here:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/hosting.196/
I'm assuming I don't really want to use the GoDaddy free trial website creator doohickey.
you're assuming correctly. I'm not computer literate like you, so if you'll ask for specifics I can't give them to you since I've not used Godaddy in over 12 years. All I know is that they're tricksters (to put it mildly)
Any and all advice and information is welcome; I am incredibly humble with just a touch of overwhelmed in this new world.
probably I'm not the best person to give SEO advice since I've not ranked a site in nearly 2 years, but what I can say is that if you're going the AI route (that is, creating AI content with chatGPT) try to edit it manually before publishing it. Some people say that unedited AI content still ranks, others say the opposite. Just edit it from the start to avoid getting de-ranked later on and having to go through the entire content to make the edits then.
Something else that I would recommend is that you avoid targeting keywords for which the 1st page of google is full of garbage (garbage = stuff that we, the webmasters, don't like, such as youtube clips, ads, AI content generated by google themselves, knowledge graphs and PAAs, etc... al of these elements take away precious virtual real estate from your site, so if you target keywords whose SERP is filled with these elements you'll struggle getting traffic even if you rank #1. So, avoid such keywords whenever possible, maybe targeting a handful of these keywords is OK if you have 1000s of others that are better, but if you're in a niche where there's a serious lack of keywords... well... I think that this is a bad niche actually and you should change it
)
What else, what else... hmm... oh yeah, indexing and sandboxing... Until you get your content indexed you won't get traffic from google, so make sure to index the important content pages of your site...
As for sandbox, it IS possible that you will not see a single ranking, and a single visitor from google for anywhere between 3 months and 2 years (depending on the niche most likely). So, if you know that you've done everything by the book and you're still not seeing results don't panic and don't quit! Just keep working at your site and as soon as you get out of the (eventual) sandbox you'll start experiencing slow but steady growth...
Backlinking.... you can start building links from day 1 if you want (I personally preferred to build links to only the pages of my site that were already indexed, just as extra safety, but a lot of folks around the forum say that this is not needed, so you can start link building whenever you want, no matter if the linked pages are indexed or not).
But the important thing is to start off slowly... slow and steady wins the (SEO) race usually...
Check out this guide on link building to learn how to tackle this subject:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/guide-how-many-links-per-day-week-or-month-should-i-build.1502403/
I can't think of anything else (and I'm having a horrible headache anyway), so start with these pointers first and if something else comes up I'll update this thread... or maybe other folks can share their tips, that will work too I guess...
Good luck!
