I rediscovered this great piece from Patrick McKenzie, an SEO primer for startups, but actually valid for anyone trying to generate traffic, interest, and business from the internet for anything at all.

The first cut of your SEO strategy will be wrong, just like v1.0 of your product will be non-responsive to the needs of your users. That is OK: after you start you’ll begin collecting insights and data which let you refine it. You want to get something out the door as soon as possible so that you can begin collecting links, other indicia of trust, and data on what is working for you. Many startups wait until launch to put a significant amount of content on their websites. This is almost always a mistake.

SEO has always been a powerful tool for us as we’ve expanded. We’ve used many of the approaches Patrick outlines here over the years to build a nice presence. I’d add my biggest takeaway here in getting impact out of SEO (and content in general) is to make it programmatic — it’s not something you do in spikes, except for things like major product release milestones or equivalent, but that you keep constant pressure on over time to gradually raise the waters. I strongly agree with the quote above, that if you treat content generation like an experimental, “agile” process, the error correction feedback it affords is priceless to be getting your work out there early. Time is your friend with exposure on the internet. The longer you have something up, the more opportunity for discovery.

For a 10 year old article, I can’t find anything in here that’s outdated or been made irrelevant.