Starting out on my first site. Feedback and thoughts would be great

[gillies8888]

My first sports site is ready www.sbat.com/tips and www.sbat.com

Content is going in slowly, and signed up for a pro membership on here.

Looking to use this site to build up my SEO knowledge.

We go live tomorrow, but any early thoughts would be great

Will be in and around here alot trying to learn from the Gurus

Gary

[David-Kley]

Best advice: Do it right the first time. What does that mean:

1. Having the sitemap.xml file accurate and ready to be submitted. 
2. Not focusing just on Google. Submit your site and links links to all webmasters.
3. Making sure your site is complete, meaning all meta, titles, and urls are all unique and filled out with relevant information. Some of your titles are not specific, such as:
http://www.sbat.com/livescores/ - Page title is Live scores...think of how users will search for your page. A More appropriate title would be "LIve Sports Scores | Live Soccer Scores from Around the World" or something similar.

4. Getting rid of duplicate URL's. If you are using a CMS, then you want to make sure you follow this rule: One url to one page of content. View more on this topic here: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/5-htaccess-rules-to-avoid-duplicate-content
5. Making sure your images and alt text is properly filled out. For example: Dont label images image123.jpg, name them what you want to rank for, such as stl-cardinals-jersey.jpg or something like that. You never know how users will search for content or answers, so optimize as broad as possible.
6. Submit all pages in webmaster tools using "Fetch as google". This allows you to submit individual and sitewide crawls of your site. Helps in getting pages indexed/reindexed faster
7. Plan ahead. Launch of a website then hoping it will rank well is a fast way to not rank. Think of ways to gain additional validation and backlinks. Press releases can be a great way to do this when you are just starting out.

That should get you started. Hope this helps!