Thank you very much for the tips UW
I think my original idea of basically copying an existing site that I know follows the rules and making my own was a bad idea, mainly because I fucked up and waited a week or so between working on it and forgot to make it my own and change the template, and because like you said there are a lot of meta tags and hidden stuff that aren't related to the change in content.
Going to start from scratch - I'm always just paranoid that I'm missing 1
little rule and the site will fail - which is why I wanted to start off with a site I knew would be accepted, but I suppose to just know the rules and be able to build something from scratch is the far better option now in retrospect
again thank you!