those bulletpoints pertain to parasite SEO (ie. 3rd party sites - like Medium, Reddit, Blogger, etc - that rank high in google for many keywords, due to their high authority). So, you can't use this guide for your website as your website has no authority yet (and trust even less), so it wouldn't benefit from this strategy.
You do need to target long tail keywords initially, though... and to also optimize your content as best as you can (you can use paid tools like RankMath PRO, Frase, NeuronWriter, etc. to do this), otherwise I don't think you'll get far
Also internal linking is important too... and site structure, technical SEO and topical authority come to think of it. So, you gotta nail all of these things perfectly in order to rank well, and even then, you still need to play the waiting game as many times ranking doesn't come fast (it can take 3-6 months or longer before you see rankings)....
So, as I was saying, you need to nail all of these things down:
1) keyword research (focus on queries that are at least 5-6 words long, and - equally important - that you don't see mentioned in the title and content of your top ranking competitors for those keywords)
2) site planning and structuring (thinking your site's structure before you even build it is paramount for the easy navigation and crawlability of your site by google and by your visitors, so make sure to create a good plan for your site before you build it).
If you need help planning your site out (topics, categories, supporting articles, etc) these 2 guides by Splishsplash can help before you get the hang of it:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/seo-siloing-2023-the-last-siloing-guide-youll-ever-need.1502244/
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/guide-full-example-of-how-to-do-on-page-seo.1251425/
3) make and keep your site...
a... fast loading
b... clean and intuitive
c... mobile friendly
d... well structured
e... easy to crawl and navigate...
a) Fast loading... ideally, you will want
every important page on your site to load up in under 1 second... in under 2 seconds if under 1 second is not possible.
To check your site's speed (both on desktop and mobile devices) you can (and should!) use these 2 resources:
-
Page Speed Insights
-
GTMetrix
To make your site load fast (besides what GTMetrix recommends) you can do all of these and more...
- use fast hosting server
- use lightweight theme
- use as few plugins as possible (usually caching and SEO plugins, maybe a few more depending on your goal, business type, etc)
- compress images using plugins like Smushit or Shortpixel
- use a CDN (Cloudflare is probably the most popular option, but
Bunny is another option) to serve your content to your visitors worldwide, locally
- use as few animations as possible (animations also make you look unprofessional in certain industries, so you really don't want to use them anyway)
- compress and lazy load all images
b) making a site clean and intuitive is not easy if you're not an organized person by default, so I don't know how to make you do this as it needs to come from within your own organizational spirit and attitude.
What I can say, however, is that if you follow the site structuring guide I've linked above you will get a bit organized by way of how you'll learn to structure your site.
Also important, try to keep all of your important pages (usually the blog posts, services pages, etc) maximum 3 clicks away from the homepage. ALL of them! Ideally, you will want it to be 2 clicks away, but 3 can work too if you really can't make all pages reachable in 2 clicks from the homepage...
c) I don't remember how to make your site mobile friendly, but I think that many premium themes (at least for Wordpress) do make your site responsive by default, so you don't have to do anything. But do make sure that the theme you're using comes with this feature...
For Wordpress, popular and good themes that I remember off the top of my head are GeneratePress (I could never wrap my head around using this theme, but it's a good one for sure), Astra, Neve, Flatsome, Avada, Newspaper.... lots of good themes around, so choose one of these if you can afford it, it will pay off well in the long run...
Or you can use builders like Elementor, Divi, etc... but I think Elementor makes your site sluggish... at least it used to be like this 3 years ago when I last checked, I'm not sure whether they've fixed this bloatware builder, but if they did, it's probably a good option as it was pretty intuitive when I last checked it...
So anyway, make sure there is a mobile-friendly version for your site, otherwise google might not even consider indexing it (I remember that there was this scare last year that they refuse to index sites that are not mobile friendly, so be mindful of this!)
d) by well structured I mean using various schemas to structure your data in a way that google loves to see. Personally, I never understood how schemas work (or what even this is
), but it's one of those geeky things that needs to be done, so make sure you include schemas in every page where it's appropriate. You can learn more about schemas at
schema.org
e) easy to crawl and navigate... you will basically do this automatically if you pre-plan and structure your site according to the stuff I've linked above, so there's nothing special you can do about this particular point if you've done everything right from the beginning...
Although, I should probably mention internal linking here, as internal links are a big thing nowadays, they help both with UX and crawlability by the googlebot. So, make sure to interlink all important pages with each other, but only within their own silos (cross silo linking only when the relevancy between the 2 pages is extremely high)...
Also, make sure to never use more than one internal link every 100-500 words (the chosen number of words depends on how aggressive you wish / need to be with your links, but if in doubt just keep one internal link per 400-500 words and this will be safe in most cases, but make sure that the internal links are relevant and flow naturally into the content, don't just hyperlink random words that make no sense for the pages that those links point to)
Last but not least (and since I've run out of bullet points) I should also mention technical SEO in here, especially since it's related to the crawlability aspect of your site.
So, take a moment to read, understand, and implement the tips in this guide as technical SEO is a big deal too, and it can make or break your site's rankings in the shortest time you can think of
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/technical-seo-guide-my-checklist-and-useful-tips.1389710/
But don't rely on this guide only! It's a good guide for sure and you should definitely follow it, but it's a bit old and some things have changes in the last 3-4 years, so research and find other things you can do regarding the technical aspect of your SEO!
All of my sites had auto generated legal pages and never run into any issues, legal or SEO-wise
So yeah, you can auto-generate them, but be careful that some sites will include links to their site inside of your generated (Privacy Policy usually) page, so you need to go through that content to edit out all of the watermarks and links back to 3rd party sites. Also edit the placeholder info (site, email, phone, URL for contact page, etc), as some of these generators do come with default info that you need to replace with your own.
Also, while these pages are OK in the beginning, when / if your site grows big you kind of need to tailor the legal pages to your own needs, or else you might run into various problems (usually knowledgeable customers who do take the time to read through that mumbo-jumbo, see that it's standard stuff, and find a loophole to abuse your Terms of Service and they might cause you big financial losses that you have no power against because your ToS are general stuff instead of being tailored to your own business needs.)
But anyway, in the beginning / for affiliate sites those auto-generated pages will do...
