7 steps to prepare your new site for search results

One of the biggest concerns for new website owners is attracting traffic to their sites, especially in the first months of creating the site. The Internet is vast, and it is getting larger. Every day, millions of new sites are created. These sites compete fiercely to attract visits, especially from search engines, which are the first source of visits on the Internet, as it is estimated that 93% of the visits that sites receive come from search engines. That's why website owners focus on it so much, as it is an inexhaustible source of visits and potential customers.

If you want your new website to succeed, you must stand out from your competitors and be ahead of them in the largest possible number of keywords. Everyone who is familiar with SEO knows that this is difficult, as the competition is intense, and everyone wants to reach the first page of search results. As a new website owner, the challenge will be double, because you will be starting from scratch, with no backlinks, no reputation, and little content. You will have to work your way up, and outperform your competitors’ sites, which have backlinks, a good reputation, and a lot of excellent content. Although it is difficult, it is possible, but you have to be smart, prepare a solid plan, and adhere to SEO standards.

In this article, we will review 7 steps to help you prepare your new site for search engines and improve its ranking for the chosen keywords. Contents of the topic Toggle 1- Choosing the site domain 2- Building the site 3- Preparing the site internally for SEO 4- Preparing the site’s SEO externally 5- Doing keyword research 6- Content creation 7- Follow-up and analysis Sources 1- Choosing the site field There is no doubt that you have a specific goal that you seek to achieve by creating the site. Perhaps you want to create an online store to sell products, or create an educational website, or a website for your company, or a blog to publish your ideas. The first thing you should do when creating a new website is to choose a domain name for your site. The domain name will be the name by which people know your site, and the address through which they reach you.

A domain name consists of two parts, the domain name and the domain extension (top-level domain, or TLD for short). The domain name should be appropriate for the contents of your site, and some SEO experts advise including one of the keywords you target in the domain name. For example, if you want to create a website for books, it is preferable that the domain name contain a keyword related to books, such as “kutub,” “kitab,” or “books” and other words that express the goal of the site.

Regarding the domain extension, it is generally preferable to use the “com” extension, because it is famous and widely used. But there are other extensions, some of which carry specific connotations, for example: .net – general, similar to the extension .com .org – an extension specific to organizations .edu – an extension specific to educational websites .gov – an extension specific to government institutions There is another type of extension, which are extensions that represent countries, such as .sa, which represents Saudi Arabia, and .uk, which represents the United Kingdom, but obtaining it requires special conditions, such as nationality of the country, or possession of a commercial register there. You must choose the domain name and extension well. They must be compatible with the purpose of the site, because it will last with you forever, and it will be very difficult for you to change it later, because people will know you by it.

The domain name should be as short as possible, easy to remember, and it is preferable, as we said, to contain a keyword that expresses the purpose of the site and its contents. However, avoid using trademark names in the domain name, as this may expose you to legal prosecution. There are many sites that sell domain names for as little as a few dollars a year, including Domain.com, namecheap, Godaddy, and others. Enter it and search for the appropriate domain name.

2- Website building There are two basic methods for building a website: Website building platforms: Some platforms allow you to build ready-made websites, such as WordPress, Weebly, and WebStarts, and there are other platforms that specialize in building specific types of websites, such as WooCommerce and Shopify, which specialize in building electronic stores. These platforms are easy to use and do not require programming knowledge. It is also characterized by speed of development, as you can create a website with it within a short time.

But on the other hand, its disadvantage is that it may be slow compared to sites built from scratch, and modifying advanced functions may require the help of a programmer. Building a website from scratch: The other way to build websites is to develop it from scratch without resorting to website building platforms. This requires knowledge of website development techniques, and it usually takes longer than with website building platforms. In contrast, websites built from scratch are usually faster, as a result of they are optimized specifically for the needs of the sites, unlike website building platforms that are usually intended for general use. You can build a website from scratch by relying on a software company, or by hiring a freelance web developer through a freelance platform, for example.

There are many factors that should be taken into consideration when building a website, which can have a significant impact on the user experience, and thus on SEO, such as: Website design: The website design should be attractive and elegant, and give the visitor the impression of professionalism. Do not forget also to make the site responsive to phone screens, because search engines take responsiveness to phones into account when ranking sites. Loading speed: If your site needs more than 3 seconds to load, half of the visitors will leave it, and loading speed is one of the ranking factors in search engines.

Therefore, you should invest in speeding up your site, by purchasing fast hosting, following the recommended rules for website programming, and also avoiding too many large images, because they take time to load, especially on phones. Security: Security should be a priority when building a site. The site should be protected from attacks and hacking, by purchasing an SSL certificate, and taking into account the security rules in force in the industry, especially if financial transactions are conducted on the site, or if it stores sensitive data about users. Because any hacking of your site, or leakage of user data will have serious consequences on your site’s reputation. Moreover, search engines, such as Google, consider security one of the basic ranking factors.

3- Preparing the site internally for SEO. Google relies on about 200 factors to rank sites. These factors are divided into internal factors and external factors. Internal factors are factors related to the site’s internal structure, how content is written and presented, and how the site is organized and designed. Here are some of the most important factors: Keywords: There are special places in which you should place the keywords you are targeting, such as the meta description tag. SEO experts also recommend placing keywords in the main title (H1), as well as in at least one subtitle (H2), and it is also recommended to place keywords in the first paragraph of the text, preferably in the first sentence. Key density: Key density is the ratio of the number of times a keyword appears out of the total number of text words.

For example, if you target the keyword “create a blog,” and the number of words in the text is 2,000 words, and the number of times the word “create a blog” appears is 50 times, the key density will be equal to 50/2000 = 1/40, or 2.5%. SEO experts recommend that key density be between 0.5 and 1%.

One of the mistakes that beginners make is that they focus too much on keyword density, and they try to raise it in any way, by forcefully stuffing the keyword into every corner of the content, so you find them writing things like this: “Creating a blog has become very important for projects, because creating a blog can increase sales and attract more visitors, so you should create a blog for your project. There are many ways to create a blog...” This content seems stupid, right? Avoid this, focus on quality content, and place keywords smoothly and naturally. Another thing that Arab SEO experts advise is to focus on the form of the word. For example, the keywords “to create a blog,” “create a blog,” and “create your blog” are treated differently from “create a blog,” so try to adhere to the original form as much as possible.

Preparing sites for mobile phones: Mobile phones usually operate with low throughput, so if the site contains a lot of images, videos, and media, the pages may take a long time to load, and this may annoy mobile users, and may cause them to leave the site forever. That's why you should optimize your site for mobiles, by optimizing image sizes, and using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which is a technology that speeds up the loading of web pages when browsing them on phones. 4 - Preparing site SEO externally In addition to internal factors, there are external factors that should be taken into consideration, including but not limited to: User signals: User signals include all metrics that measure the extent of users’ satisfaction with your site.

These signals are very important to Google, as it seeks to improve the ranking of the sites that receive the best signals, that is, the sites that users are satisfied with: There are many user signals, the most important of which are: Bounce rate: It measures the percentage of site visitors who leave the site without browsing other pages. If this rate is large, it means that the visitors did not find your site interesting, and therefore left it without browsing further. Click-through rates: This signal represents the percentage of people who clicked on a website link after they saw it.

If this rate is small, it means that people were not convinced by the site, so they did not click on it, and Google does not like to place such sites on the first results pages. Browsing time (dwell time): This is a very important metric, because it represents the average time that visitors spend on your site. For Google, if this metric is long, it means that people spend a long time browsing your site, and this is an indication that they liked its contents, which will reflect positively on your site’s ranking.

Social signals: These are signals coming from social networks. When someone places a link to your site in their social accounts, or when people share, retweet or like the contents of your site, this will be evidence that you are providing excellent content that people like to the point that they share it with their friends and followers on social networks. Backlinks: Backlinks are links to your site that people place on their pages, whether on their personal websites or in their social accounts. It is one of the most important ranking factors.

When creating your site, one of your first challenges will be getting backlinks, especially from reputable sites. This requires you to create excellent content, so that people can place links to it on their sites. You can also ask your clients to place links to your site on their pages, or you can write high-quality blog posts and content that contain links to your site and publish them on other hosting sites. But remember that the number is not the point, as not all backlinks are equal. There is a difference between a backlink from a respectable site with a good reputation and a good ranking on search pages, and a suspicious site with a bad reputation.

5 - Conduct keyword research Keywords are one of the most important ranking factors in search engines, and every website owner should know how to search for them and choose them. There are many tools that help you search for appropriate keywords, the most important of which is Google Analytics, which is an excellent tool for knowing the keywords through which people reach your site, as well as identifying keywords that are popular in search engines. One of the mistakes that new website owners make is that they try to target keywords that are highly popular in search engines, thinking that this will increase their chances of getting visits. This is a mistake, because this type of keyword has intense competition, and it is very difficult for a new website to surpass the competition, so it is preferable in the beginning to target keywords that have low competition, because you will have much greater chances of reaching one of the first ranks.

6 - Creating content The main reason why people enter your site is the content that you provide to them. If you do not provide good and distinguished content, no one will come to you, and even those who enter the site will leave it and will not return if they find the content poor. The main goal of search engines is to connect searchers with the best content on the Internet, so they rely heavily on the quality of the content in their ranking algorithms. Google, for example, has a special content algorithm, which is the Google Panda algorithm, which is an algorithm that seeks to lower the ranking of sites with poor or stolen content, and raise sites with good content. These are some standards that should be taken into consideration when creating content: Content length: Studies indicate that the average number of words in the content of website pages that rank in the first ten places on search results pages is 2,000 words, so you should use as much long content as possible.

Content quality: The length of the content is important, but even more important is the quality of the content. No matter how long the content is, people will leave it if it is poor after a few seconds of viewing you. This will have a direct impact on browsing time (dwell time), which is one of the ranking factors, as we mentioned above. Photos and videos: We live in the age of video and visual content. Statistics indicate that pages that contain a video have a 53 times greater chance of reaching the first page of search results compared to other sites, and that people stay on them about 260% longer than pages that do not contain a video.

The same thing is said about images and infographics, you should use them to add aesthetics to the content and provide value to the user. Avoid plagiarized content: When you start your new website, your site will be devoid of content, so you may think about copying the contents of other sites to fill your site. This is a mistake. Because it is easy for Google to know whether the content you provide is original, or copied from other sites, if you find that your site is stealing content, it will be subject to Google Panda penalties, which will delay your ranking on search pages.

In addition, stealing content may expose you to legal prosecution in many countries. Therefore, it would be better for you to invest in creating your own content, either through authoring or translating good content. If you want to speed up the content creation process, you can hire experienced writers or translators from freelance sites.

Internal links: We talked before about the importance of external links, but there is another type of link that is no less important, which are internal links. That is, the links that you place in the contents of your site that point to pages from the site itself. This type of link is very important in SEO.

Think about it from this perspective. If you succeed in attracting a visitor to your site, do you want him to leave the site immediately after viewing the page he responded to, or do you want him to visit as many other pages of the site as possible? Of course you want the latter, which is why you should include links to other content from the site in every post you publish. For example, if you published a blog post about cooking, and there are other blog posts related to this topic on your site, try to insert links to them within the content.

For example, if there is another blog post that talks about diet, you can place a link to it next to the paragraph that talks about the diet topic in the content. If the diet topic is not included in the content, you can add even a few lines to justify placing the link. 7- Follow-up and analysis: You should constantly monitor your site’s metrics to know whether you are on the right path towards achieving your goals, and whether your new site is growing and attracting more visits. Google provides two important tools for tracking site metrics.

They are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These are some of the most important indicators and metrics provided by these two tools: Bounce Rate: This is an indicator that measures the percentage of people who leave the site without visiting more pages. Source of visits: This measure determines the sources of visits coming to your site, whether they are direct, paid, from the search engine, or referred from another site or from email... Browsing time and click rate: We talked about these two measures above.

Demographics: You can know some important information about your site visitors, such as age, gender, geographic region, language, etc. This can help you improve your content to suit the visitors’ privacy. Other technical information: Tracking tools provide you with information related to the operating system the visitor uses, the type of device, and the percentage of people who use a phone to browse the site. In this article, we reviewed 7 of the most important steps to prepare new sites for search engines, but remember that there is no magic solution and no shortcuts to reach the first ranks of search pages. You must work hard and be patient, and do not expect results to appear overnight.

God willing, you will slowly make your way to the forefront. Sources [1] [2] [3] [4]