SEO and website promotion in general are now becoming an increasingly complex and complex process.
But (!) at the same time, any beginner can still successfully and practically free promote his site, having learned the basics and having some amount of time. The more time you spend, the better, of course. All this is possible if you do most of the work yourself and do not delegate.
I am focusing on free website promotion, independent. Because this is exactly what my target audience is interested in - visitors to my blog, buyers of the TOP Base. But some inexpensive tools are worth using. I gave my recommendations on SEO tools (programs and services), including completely free ones, in a separate article.
This guide was conceived by me NOT as a detailed step-by-step guide, but simply as a brief REFERENCE for those who still know very little about SEO, website promotion - as a clear list of the main types of work and the main nuances that you need to know about today, the main mistakes in order to prevent them.
After all, some mistakes today can be irreparable.
Topics other than SEO will not be covered here, such as email marketing, lead generation, contextual advertising, social media promotion (SMM) and much more.
The main purpose of this guide is to give a brief overview of the system, what stages and processes the independent promotion of sites consists of and what is most important in them.
I will try very hard without "abstruse" terms or decipher them more often. Google the rest.
I have a fear that the article turned out not quite for complete beginners in SEO, but it perfectly complements my free SEO course- it is advanced, has 20 lessons on all major topics and was updated in 2019, is completely up to date.
The main areas of work:
Now in order:
1. TEXTS (CONTENT)
The most important direction today.
First and most important - with high-quality texts at times, if not ten times easier to move forward- you can actively and successfully use , you can sincerely recommend your materials - you will be pleased that people treat them positively, and this will increase your motivation to continue to proactively distribute links to your materials and promote the site, write new ones like VERY QUALITY, really useful, valuable materials.
Particularly well promoted materials such as:
- great walkthroughs
— practical cases, success stories
— TOP…. (top niche sites, video channels, best articles, tricks, products, hacks, whatever)
— interviews with experts (may be a summary of several experts)
- tests, comparisons
- analysis of mistakes, failures
This Free Newbie Promotion Guide of mine is one example of this type of writing. I didn’t have time to promote it, but at the moment it’s 25 thousand views with almost no effort.
If site visitors are also on their own, with a desire to share, then this will be a viral increase in links and social signals to the site, an increase in the trust of the site as a whole and individual pages with materials. In addition, with high-quality texts, you build a website brand, increase your reputation and expertise in your niche.
Secondly, interesting texts significantly improve your behavioral factors - people stay longer on the site, fewer bounces, add to bookmarks, share, come back, if lost, then try to find it by entering your name and the approximate title of the article into the search, and so on. Good Behavioral Factors (BEFs) improve search engine rankings.
Thirdly, the uniqueness and quality of texts are becoming more and more important for search engines. And for articles ordered from SEO copywriters on the textsale or etxt exchange for 30 rubles per thousand characters, they cannot be high by default. Today Baden-Baden, Panda and other search engine filters actively come for watery SEO texts about what has already been written a hundred times on the Internet. Since the beginning of 2018, Yandex has already knocked down a lot of information sites that did not have good behavioral factors, had too much advertising and had little useful texts.
It is very useful today to have a "Blog" or "Articles" section on a corporate website. .
Very good, almost certainly if the texts include the following inserts:
- lists
— diagrams, diagrams, drawings, infographics
- photos, images
- video (not necessarily your own)
- links to other pages (you can and should also link to other resources that are significant in your subject, which really add value to your material. Opening links is best done in a new window)
Where can I check the uniqueness of texts and various other characteristics of texts that are important for SEO. In my opinion, this pair of online services is enough:
The uniqueness of the text on your site may not be very high if:
- someone stole (copied in whole or a large piece) your text
- you yourself or your promoters replicated it on different sites - in company directories, in press releases, on bulletin boards, on forums, etc.
- there are duplicates from pieces of text on your other pages on your own site.
With the uniqueness of the texts is not the easiest situation. Even if you were the original source, a more reputable site may still rank higher than you.
But in most cases, the text on your site will be considered the original source, and this, after all, is an important point. But if this page is targeted and very significant for you, if you want to consciously promote it high in the TOP, and it has little unique text, rewrite it.
It is best to do the rewriting "with knowledge of the matter." For example, looking at what is happening with competitors.
View the values of the main parameters of sites according to your TOP for a specific key request, for example, these two services:
Pixel Plus gives a comparison of YOUR relevant page (it determines it itself) and the average values for the pages of competitors in the TOP by query only for Yandex.
Seolib gives out just the overall parameters for the TOP - both in Google and Yandex.
"TOP Analysis" from Pixel Tools provides very valuable information that you can focus on when writing or editing texts and compares it with your relevant page. The service immediately gives recommendations on what needs to be increased and by how much, what to reduce. He shows:
— Volume of text in words
— The number of exact occurrences of the query in the text
— The percentage of occurrence of words from the query in the text
- Occurrence of words from the query in the Title tag
— Entry into anchors of outgoing links
— Percentage of occurrences of re-enchantments in the text
— Absence in the text of words that are often found among competitors
— Number of relevant documents by Title tag
- Internal links to URLs
— Length of the Title tag in words
— External links to the domain
- TIC
— Availability of HTTPS and share of competitors on HTTPS
In Seolib, in addition to Yandex, you can also see Google, and more general parameters of competitors - such as the number of pages in the search engine index, the age of the domain, whether there are Yandex Catalog, Dmoz, which pages are mainly in the TOP - main or page 2 th level and deeper.
I have covered this issue in more detail in these two articles:
(!)
Today it is very important to use when writing texts synonyms, words from highlights and tips of search engines, those that are most often used by competitors, toponyms (below I will show how highlights and tips look like). These are the so-called LSI-words - words that form your subject.
And in general, it is always useful to simply look at the eye - what is happening in the TOP of competitors, what kind of texts, content, how it is presented, how it is optimized, etc. For competitor analysis, see the last paragraph.
2. SEMANTICS (KEY REQUESTS)
On Semantic Core, I have a detailed tutorial in my free SEO course. Subscribe, receive, study. All the basics are there - about the “long tail of low-frequency queries”, and about the types of key queries, and how to collect, and much more.
What you need to do:
1) make up the whole semantic core, from scratch. Cluster it (group it) and distribute it across the site, by pages, create new sections and pages on the site for requests that are not yet covered, do internal linking, etc.
2) select additional queries for existing pages and directions, optimize and promote consciously (!) on them.
3) determine for yourself the requests that are close in the TOP3-50, for example, and “finish” higher. This is one of the most important actions to increase overall site traffic.
Here, for example, in this form in the Sitereport.rf service, you can get the visibility of your site for free for 300 queries close to the TOP of Yandex and Google separately, and work on promoting those that have enough traffic or are your most targeted requests and deserve attention.
But, in principle, since they are close to the top and usually there are transitions to your site for such queries, you can get almost the same information and even more from your Yandex Metrica, Google Analytics, LiveInternet, webmaster cabinets in both search engines and others. services. It is true that Yandex and Google are now encrypting most requests and statistics have become far from being as complete and capacious as they once were, so it is worth using all possible services.
The list of free services, what they will give you and in what form, with screenshots, I wrote in the article "Free site visibility analysis in search".
Here in the screenshot, I filtered so that the lowest positions in the PS from the entire list of requests offered by Sitereport were first:
How pages are “pinned” to the TOP:
— improving the page (improving the text in terms of its value for the user, improving it in terms of keywords, synonyms, etc., improving the presentation of the text, including various inserts and media files in the text)
- improved optimization
- reference mass - both natural free and purchased
— social signals
— improvement of behavioral factors (including through the improvement of the snippet to increase its clickability)
- internal linking
Of course, the main tool that everyone uses is the KeyCollector program. This is the main software on the market for the removal and analysis of COA. But for beginners, I think TopVisor will definitely be easier and it has a lot of advantages.
The most basic mistakes when working with the Semantic Core:
- the semantic core is poorly developed, taken from the head
— similar requests are “planted” on different pages
- promotion is not conscious - it is not tracked which page is relevant for a key query from different search engines, and whether it corresponds to your landing page that you are promoting for this query.
Relevant - the page that the SAMA search engine considered the most appropriate on your entire site to answer this key query and which it gives out in the search results. Read more about the difference in relevant pages and what it threatens.
- it is not taken into account that there are informational and commercial requests that should be promoted on different types of documents.
— competitors in the TOP only have the main pages for this key query, and you sharpened the 2nd level page for it and promote it.
- you have no chance at all to advance on this request, because competitors have all other parameters (reference, host, etc.) too high - choose queries with lower frequency and less competitive ones.
If the semantic core has already been worked out, then new ideas on SA can be taken from:
– analysis of various thematic communities – forums, social networks (what they say, with what words)
- online services that give out "visibility of the site in search engines" - this is, for example, Sitereport.rf (it does both a free analysis of the site's visibility and a paid selection of other suitable semantics on the machine), Xtool. .
- services for analyzing your competitors (of course, these are the most powerful tools for collecting key queries) - Spywords, Semrush.
- large-scale ready-made databases of keywords. The Pastukhov base ceased to exist. But there is, for example, a free Bookvarix.
One of the most common questions is whether to make an article under MF (mid-frequency) key request + LF Requests or many, many articles only under LF (low-frequency) requests.
There are 2 main options here:
1. A VERY high-quality large, well-designed article for mid-range requests and low-frequency requests, which is also actively promoted by links and social signals. Gradually, it has every chance to rise high in the positions of the midrange of the request or requests and spontaneously capture many other low-frequency and micro-low-frequency requests.
2. A lot of articles for low-frequency queries, which are much easier to "kick out" in the TOP with a much smaller number of links and other measures such as internal linking. BUT (!) such articles collect much less traffic and most often do not give a viral increase in links and social signals to the site, i.e. self-growth of the overall trust of the site and the specific article.
Today, ideally, combine both strategies (and from small articles under LF, you can put links to larger ones under MF) or actively practice the first strategy.
3. SEARCH OPTIMIZATION
I have written articles on this blog:
But the main thing today is not to allow re-optimization! How to diagnose re-optimization filters in Yandex, see this post.
Which page elements are the most important to include keywords in:
— Text
the required number of direct occurrences of the key query (on average, about 2%, we also look at the TOP by Pixel Tools).
Exact occurrences in the first and last sentences are still recommended, not only exact, but also various diluted key queries in the text (but without enumeration), synonyms, words from highlights, hints, toponyms, commercial markers like "buy", "price" - which are right for you according to your TOP, etc.
— Title
must include H1 or the main keyword from H1, but must not be exactly equal to your title from H1.
Mandatory exact entry of the desired request as close to the beginning as possible, the size is preferably 60-70 characters, no listing of keys separated by commas, add toponyms, commercial markers like "buy", some additional words that attract attention to the description of your site, you can then numbers.
— Meta Description
the exact occurrence of the key query at the beginning is also desirable, it should not repeat the title - it should reveal it and it would be nice to have additional keywords here and something from your USP - the most catchy moments. Up to 230 characters, with a dot at the end.
— Meta Keywords
1-2 main keywords, no more. This field is still worth filling out.
Although it is possible not to fill it out - it no longer plays any role in promotion, but spamming in this field can play a negative role.
— Page title in H1
the most important key request + some other words are possible. There should be only one H1 per page.
You should not write there a long commercial key like "Buy auto parts in Moscow." The most natural, convenient and useful for people.
— Headings H2-H6
if the text is large, then in the subheadings, a level lower than H1, we reinforce the main key request - we use it plus some other new words, and also use other key requests under which the page is promoted. But without fanaticism, otherwise you will get a filter. Better no more than 1-2 times for a large text.
— Alt title for images
alt is considered especially important. But it is desirable to set both attributes, and they should preferably not be identical, and it is not desirable that all page images have the same alt, we make a variety. That is, we put in alt and title the main keyword plus other words. And it is also desirable to include words such as "photo", "drawing", words of toponyms, synonyms, words like "buy", etc.
BUT do not make a key in each image - try to describe what is in the image first of all and avoid overspam. Image captions also play a role in applying the re-optimization filter.
The names of the image files themselves are also very desirable to be named with keywords in transliteration through a hyphen - this way they will be better found through image search and increase traffic to the site.
— Copyright at the bottom of the site
Here I would suggest to put something like this:
year copyright sign the name of the company and some main key and something interesting from the USP (preferably similar to the Title and H1 of the main page)
2017 SeoAndme: Anna Yashchenko's blog about independent free website promotion
The bottom line is that after the copyright sign and the name of the company, your main keywords should come, but at the same time they do not look like some kind of listing of keywords separated by commas. Moderately - the most important thing is that it is interestingly presented.
But attention! Today, re-optimization filters are atrocious, especially in Yandex. And if you use keys in copyright today, then be very careful, otherwise it may affect the overspam of individual pages.
This is such a slippery trick. Although often effective.
It is very convenient and desirable (especially for the main and most important landing pages) to come up with several options for the Page Title and Meta Description. And drive into some visual snippet editor for example here:
and see different options, how your snippet might look in the search, choose the best result and add it to your site.
BUT! Today you can make a meta description up to 230 characters, and this service cuts it down to 155. That is. approximately visually to understand how it will look, it is possible, but not fully. Now I usually use the Yoast SEO plugin, for example, in any of my WordPress sites.
It is also very convenient to shoot and compare snippets using the TopVisor service.
Let's take a look at the "Site Positions" section in Topvisor, where you can see the comparison of snippets in search engines.
Here, for example, I look at my site seotopshop.ru for 1 date (you can take 2 specific dates) and in the Google and Yandex search engines and see the following snippets for one request:
Different snippets, different relevant pages. Then I can, firstly, think about which single landing page I should bring both search results to, and secondly, how to improve the existing snippet.
That is, a snippet is what it is, see the screenshot below. This is the description of your site in search results. In red I highlighted one of the words in the highlight. I already mentioned the backlight in this article. Words from it should definitely be used on your page if you want to promote it well. Alexander Arsenkin, for example, has a handy free .
I also mention hints, this is:
You will not necessarily be able to create a snippet that you control - that is, you cannot be guaranteed to influence how your site description will look in search engines. But there is a very high probability of this if you make the snippet correctly.
It is also important to carefully work out the snippets of those pages that are close to the TOP, and which need to be “finished” to it.
Some articles on creating a managed snippet:
And my big expert survey No. 3 "Yandex and Google Search Engine Filters 2018", where 12 well-known SEO specialists revealed many details.
It is worth remembering that today often the same re-optimization filter can be applied to the site - for the entire or individual documents. Therefore, spamming keywords in the text, highlighting words in bold, italics, etc. — is no longer acceptable.
What services will help you see how well your pages are optimized
I will not describe in detail about the technical audit (see the lesson of my courses), I will say about common mistakes:
- duplicate pages (it is especially easy to see if the number of pages indexed by Yandex and Google is very different - then there are probably a lot of duplicates on the site)
- no redirect from www to non-www (or vice versa, it doesn't matter)
- broken links
- cyclic links (links in the page to itself)
- missing H1 or too many of them
- too many H2-H6 or they contain only service information, without keywords, spam in them
– missing Title, Meta description, Meta Keywords or too long, as well as spamming in them
- H1 is equal to Title
- no Alt, Title for images
- slow page loading speed
- the server does not return a 404 response, and there is no special page for this error
— no robots.txt or incorrectly compiled, no sitemap
– there is no adaptive or mobile version of the site
Now technical errors also include the lack of https - yes, indeed, Google is increasingly starting to crowd out such sites, and from July 2018 in Chrome all such sites without HTTPS will be marked as insecure, which will greatly reduce traffic from Google. In Yandex, too, in many tops, the share of HTTPS sites can be 70-80%, which means that it is almost impossible for a site on HTTP to break into such a TOP, and then it becomes more and more difficult.
Therefore, you should think about switching to https, so as not to lose traffic from Google. Here I have a good selection of tutorials on migrating to https .
And also excellent, all technical points are written in detail, including speeding up the loading of the site, the correct transition to HTTPS and others in the new textbook "SEO-Guru 2018" from Dr.Max.
I also recommend watching such a short material from Dmitry Sevalnev, what options are there to remove duplicates, and which ones are priority.
5. INTERNAL LINKING
There are a lot of articles and guides about linking on the Internet. There are many different schemes - circular, star and so on.
I usually try to simply link from different materials to the most relevant ones on the topic, plus separately link the most significant pages or those that I need to reach the TOP by linking. That is, somehow, especially according to the schemes, I most often do not bother.
In general, you can watch and analyze the weight of pages with programs such as, (I don’t know which one is better).
To increase the weight of a page, it is best to link to it from other pages on your site that are relevant to this key query.
All relevant pages for a query on a specific site in Yandex, for example, can be found like this:
The first page is the page that the search engine considers the most relevant for this query and shows in the general issue. Ideally, promote it (unless you want to override your relevant page with another, better landing page). And put links to it from those pages that go below.
Another thing worth mentioning is the anchor profile. Anchors are those words, those texts on which you put links.
Ideally, most of the links on the site, even within the framework of internal linking, should have unique anchors - fewer identical and clear exact occurrences of key queries, more diluted.
But it is from the most relevant pages (see the screenshot above) that it is better to link to the keys.
6. LINK PROMOTION
I have been writing about this for a year now, a lot of articles have been written. I will not give them all here, but in this article there is a brief instruction and a reference to all my posts.
The most important of my manuals and posts(they have links to my other articles and guides on topics):
In them, in principle, you will find everything on the actual promotion of links.
What can be singled out as the most important for effective and safe link promotion:
— reference factor— just one of many. But he still plays a very significant role and will continue to play. It is especially noticeable when promoting low-frequency requests to the TOP. And it is especially important for promotion in Google. Any talk about the fact that the links no longer work is complete nonsense.
— an increasing share of the link mass is occupied and should be occupied by natural free links. This is placement on forums, social networks, blog systems, company directories, press release sites, question and answer services, feedback services, social news services, a little in selected site directories and in a number of other types of sites.
See study.
These types of links play a very important role. They help to raise and stabilize the position of the site in search engines, attract real target buyers and visitors, help improve the behavioral factor, and serve as a safety cushion from various link filters, because. help build a natural link profile.
- in the growth of the link mass to the site it is highly desirable to maintain a positive trend- constant growth from month to month, or at least without strong failures, to observe regularity.
— be gradual— i.e. build links slowly. For young sites, I recommend somewhere between 200-300 "successful" registrations per month and this will give about 30-40 active direct open indexed links in fact. Or the same amount (30-40), if purchased for a young site.
- do varied link placement - different texts, on different pages of your site, different anchors (texts of the links themselves), placed on different types of sites.
- to start make up to 70-90% of links anchorless(preferably, more branded ones - on the name of the site, company or project, in combinations of project name + URL). But it's best to just have as many different options as possible with words, image links, some URL links, and so on. A small percentage of direct occurrences of your keywords and 10-20 percent of diluted keywords.
— do not order or do automatic bulk direct runs to the site(exception - a variety of layers, gaskets, CLEAN reference pyramids -)
— so as not to fall under the Minusinsk filter Yandex, it is advisable not to buy more than 200-300 SEO links to the site in general (here we mean not only temporary leased links, but search links are now well defined and most of the purchased eternal links in articles). Ideally, build a high-quality link profile using manual outreach (arrangements with webmasters of sites). The rest is natural free links. Moreover, the more natural free, crowd-links you have in your profile, the more you can increase the threshold for buying SEO-links (but not by much).
- free link placement can be a little easier with SEO software, and it will be quite effective if you act with your head. But a “magic pill”, so that some software will take and place everything itself and raise your positions with your minimum effort and without training, etc. does not exist today.
For different types of sites where you can conduct free natural link promotion, I have a separate free course. It includes many different detailed step-by-step guides in general and for certain types of sites - such as forums, press release sites, company directories, social networks and blogging systems, message boards, etc.
7. COMMERCIAL FACTORS
Commercial factors - this is what is inherent in a corporate, selling site. This is what can help him rise in positions when the site seems to have stopped moving while boosting other moments (my SEO friends and I had such clean cases when a corporate site that “got up” in positions moved from its place precisely with the help of commercial factors).
This is all that says that the site is corporate - as internal factors such as reviews on the site, promotions, price lists, city phone number, mail on the domain, online consultant, a wide range of products, the availability of certificates, an interactive map, call back, etc., as well as external such as finding a site in company directories, Yandex Directory, press release sites, review services, price list aggregators, business bulletin boards, and so on (all this is in and you can still search on your own).
What are they Detailed lists of commercial factors can be found here, for example (one of the most understandable and practical articles):
Commercial factors can always and must be increased.
8. BEHAVIORAL
I will not write much about behavioral factors now, I am preparing a separate large article.
Today it is one of the most important ranking factors. Yandex especially uses PF heavily in ranking.
Like commercial factors, PF can also be divided into external and internal.
Internal- this is what concerns your site.
It is worth looking at the overall bounce rate for your site and in particular for individual pages.
Take those pages where the number of bounces according to Yandex Metrica or Google Analytics is the highest, take a fresh look at the page and think about how it really answers the user’s request, is it interesting enough to read it in its entirety, is the text well presented, how complete and in detail, whether there is valuable data, whether there are useful photographs, drawings, tables, diagrams, links to other useful sections and materials on your site, additional useful services such as a calculator, etc.
Your goal is to increase user satisfaction from the page and from your site as a whole, increase the level of trust, a positive impression of the site, and as a result - increase the time spent on the site.
External- this is, for example, how often your brand or site url is driven into the search engine search bar or whether the user closes the search page after going to your site or vice versa - closes your site and continues to search further, and others.
You need to work comprehensively on the usefulness of your site and the popularity of your brand (in particular, using crowd marketing sites on suitable thematic or other sites with a target audience, place inactive links mentioning the name of your product or company, or site).
It helps a lot to improve the behavioral factor by the formation of an effective rich snippet— i.e. increase the CTR of its clickability in search results. This is, first of all, work with Title, Meta Description and other aspects of creating a managed snippet, as well as various elements of the expanded snippet - “quick links”, etc. (these are different elements for Google and Yandex).
9. SOCIAL SIGNALS
1. engage in competent content marketing(creating content of really high quality and level of usefulness for the user - such as all sorts of step-by-step guides, comparisons, tests, coverage of narrow practical issues, infographics, success stories, etc.).
How social signals affect the positions of sites in search engines, and what happens to the positions of sites that do not use social signals.
I have little faith in the benefits of social signals for SEO - in the sense that I myself have never seen, felt, or measured it. But I never complained about the promotion of my sites, they were always loved by search engines, if I made some efforts. Perhaps partly due to the presence of high-quality social signals.
3. make sharing buttons visible on your website, perhaps, for some types of sites, use plugins such as "social lock", pop-up windows for subscribing to groups in social networks, social network widgets, and other stimulating elements.
The promotion of social signals is also monitored by search engines - they should preferably not have too sharp a jump in growth from scratch or an explosion of social signals from spammed accounts.
10. USABILITY
I'll just highlight some of the most common mistakes, which are found on almost any site (on mine, by the way, too).
1. "Rule of 2 seconds"
A visitor to your site should see something in 2 seconds that will help him decide whether to take a further action on your site or close it.
It should be something that will interest him, inspire confidence and let him know that this site has something special, worthwhile.
It can be: your USP, some cool review, a block with competitive advantages, a strong guarantee, an interesting promotion or a special offer.
But not a general text about the company, logo and phone number.
2. USP
Your unique selling proposition must be broadcast on the main page, and preferably on each.
That is, not a dull formal text about the “sheets” company, but preferably, what makes you special, why you are better than your competitors, to be formulated in 1 sentence and placed on the header.
Plus, make some of your benefits, decorated brightly and clearly, in a list and place on each page. Not advantages, but BENEFITS for the client. It's not that you've been on the market for 10 years, but how your ten years of experience is useful for the buyer - because you have a huge base, the best guarantee or the best prices in the region, or something else.
3. Expectation of the result.
A person must understand what to expect. This is one of the most common mistakes. Next to the forms of an online application, ordering a callback, placing an order in the basket, they do not write when you can expect feedback and the working time of the site support service.
Few people will place an order in silence. Call by phone and clarify whether this form of online order on the site can be trusted and when you can expect it to be processed.
4. Dates, social evidence, dynamics on the site.
The absence of all this is still the sin of many corporate sites, on which dates must be mandatory. You go to the site - and it is not clear whether he is alive at all, or the company has long been closed. No news, no promotions, nothing with fresh dates.
Social proof is, in particular, widgets and broadcasts of posts from social networks to the site.
5. Reviews that are hard to trust.
You have decided that without search promotion, further development of the project is impossible. We found a specialist, gave him access. After a while, you get a weighty list of recommendations for implementation - at the level of the site structure, texts, and even the most sacred - design.
How to understand that all this is really necessary, and what exactly does an SEO specialist do to optimize your resource?
Regardless of whether you are engaged in site promotion in Russia, Ukraine or the USA, and, accordingly, focus on Yandex or Google, the promotion process as a whole does not change. Of course, as in other areas, there are no clear restrictions and much depends on the specifics. But still there are about a dozen mandatory stages of work.
Do you want to know about the stages of promotion specifically for your project? We will advise:
1. Analysis of the site, topics and competitors
- Internet shops.
- Websites for services and products.
- News sites.
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums.
When an SEO specialist gets all access to project analytics and webmaster panels(or adds a site there on his own), he begins to analyze the goods and services of the project, and also gives an overall assessment of the site in order to understand what work needs to be done first.
It is at this stage that a project promotion strategy and a detailed work plan are formed.
What exactly does a specialist do?
- It analyzes the overall visibility of the site not only for high-frequency queries, but also for medium- and low-frequency ones.
- Conducts an analysis of competitors, market leaders, in order to understand what to focus on in this topic, what is better on competitors' websites.
- Analyzes the structure of leading sites in a niche, their link profile.
- Marks requests for which landing pages need to be created and optimized on the client's website.
- Conducts both regular analytics based on search results and system analytics, for example, using Serpstat.
Why is all this necessary? An SEO specialist determines whether it is necessary to immediately carry out global changes on the site. For example, change the CMS (content management system), adapt the site for mobile devices, change protocol from http to https etc.
A competent specialist notifies the need for global changes in advance in order to clarify with the programmers how much it is possible, for example, to refine the current version of the CMS.
It also allows you to clarify the entire budget for website promotion - the cost of content, links, other expenses.
It is better to make global changes in advance, otherwise, after 3-4 months of work on implementing an SEO audit, you will find yourself at a dead end - you will encounter the fact that it is technically impossible to optimize filters, add new tags or categories.
2. Formation of the primary core of search queries
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Websites for services and products.
- News sites.
- Business card sites (not one-page sites).
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums.
Now you have in your hands a promotion strategy, a work plan, a preliminary analysis of the site and sites of market leaders. At a new stage, an SEO specialist, using Serpstat, Wordstat and other tools for collecting search queries, collects, clusters into groups, breaks through the frequency semantic core.
It will be useful for:
- formation of the site structure;
- compiling templates for generating and forming meta tags manually (Title, Description, Keywords), headings H1, H2;
- writing texts on landing pages;
- creating a competent linking;
- external site optimization;
- site visibility analysis.
The semantic core can consist of both several hundred search queries (for small business card sites) and several hundred thousand (for online stores).
The process of compiling the core is long and, depending on the size of the site, can take several months. That is why it is divided into sections and categories so as not to slow down progress and expand the semantic core in parallel with other works.
3. Formation of a broad site structure
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Sites of services and products, except for some projects with a narrow focus.
- News sites.
- Business card sites (not one-page sites).
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums.
Search engines are constantly improving their algorithms and show the most relevant pages for user queries. If you type “laptops with backlit keyboards” into the search engine, you will see the pages most relevant to these queries in the first places.
If you want to see your project in these positions, you cannot do without the formation of a wide site structure. For each group of search queries, you need to create and optimize your landing page.
At the same time, it is important to remember that it is better to optimize specific product cards for super-low-frequency queries, since they will only interfere with the promotion of important pages, taking away some of their internal static weight.
A request that was entered no more than 5 times a month is considered super-low-frequency.
Category pages are created for high-frequency queries, and static filter/filter intersection pages are created for medium and low-frequency queries.
Where do you get ideas for creating new landing pages?
- Issuance analysis.
- Analysis of competitors.
- Internal site search.
- Analysis of the product range / range of services.
For large stores with distribution centers in different cities, as well as bulletin boards, marketplaces, companies with branches, the number of landing pages in the structure is multiplied by the number of cities. At the same time, it is important that the content of such pages is unique.
This is a long process, and in large projects, new filter pages for specific categories are created even two years after the start of promotion of the site. But still, the bulk of the work to expand the structure of landing pages should be carried out much earlier - in order to quickly get the desired effect.
4. Formation of a task for internal optimization
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Websites for services and products.
- News sites.
- Business card sites (not one-page sites).
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums.
The specialist corrects errors in the internal optimization of the site, works with landing pages for groups of queries, removes duplicate pages. To do this, a technical SEO audit of the site is carried out, on the basis of which a task for internal optimization is formed.
The following items must be completed (in order of importance):
- Setting up automatic generation of Title, Description and H1 headers based on templates for categories, products, filters, filter intersections, pages created for geoqueries, and the like.
- Formation of page addresses on the site (bringing them to a human-readable form).
- Filter optimization: creating rules for generating URLs for filters and their intersections, meta tags, visibility of links to filters).
- Increasing the speed of server response, loading site pages.
- Removing duplicates with permanent redirects, canonical URLs, noindex follow.
- Create an XML sitemap.
- Multilingual setup (if language versions are available).
- Optimization of pagination pages.
- Optimization of server response code and page headers.
- Setting up micro-markup of reviews, information on the pages of product cards.
5. Organization of internal linking
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Websites for services and products.
- News sites.
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums.
Often the reason for poor site ranking is the problem with filling promoted pages with static weight. What are we talking about?
It is important not only to create landing pages, but also to organize internal linking so that users and the search robot can easily get to other pages. Otherwise, they may not appear in the search engine index.
This problem usually occurs with pages of optimized filters - the user can get to such pages by selecting a filter, but the search robot does not see it.
Also, at the site promotion stage, an SEO specialist builds a linking of menu categories using developed scripts, where he adds previously collected and clustered queries, transfers static weight from pages with low competition (for example, from product cards, filter intersections) to pages of a higher level of nesting.
6. Content optimization
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Websites for services and products.
- News sites.
- Business card sites (not one-page sites).
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
The optimizer manually generates unique meta tags (Title, Description, Keywords) and H1 headers based on the "long tail" of search queries for those pages where it is needed. Also, for the promoted pages of the site, texts are formed that include previously collected key queries, of course, taking into account the current requirements of search engines.
Texts affect both the ranking of pages for high-frequency queries and the display for long-tail queries.
7. Working with the crawl budget
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Sites of services and products, where it is possible to filter the search results, sort them.
- Boards of announcements.
The crawl budget of a search robot is the number of pages that it can crawl at one time on the site.
Often site owners, after reading 1-2 articles on site promotion using filter and tag optimization, create hundreds of pages of useless filters for which there are no requests or there are very few of them. Moreover, pages of intersections of two filters from one block (for example, two brands), intersections of four or more filters are not closed for the robot. They do not hide pages of various sortings: by price, rating, number of products per page. These are all gross errors.
As a result, the search robot can index only a part of the filter pages and leave the site. Even if you do everything else competently, this is what will cause the pages to not be included in the index. Moreover, the static weight of category pages will be greatly reduced.
Great case for working with filters: “How to save a project and increase organic traffic by 109% in 6 months”.
It is recommended to work with the crawling budget only for specialists with experience. Specialists will competently close "junk pages" for indexing, created only for the convenience of users, leave only the necessary filters, prohibit robots from bypassing "junk pages" and close links to them.
8. Improving site usability
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Websites for services and products.
- News sites.
- Business card sites (not one-page sites).
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums.
Do search engine algorithms take into account behavioral factors - how the user interacts with the site? Yes, take into account.
SEO specialists work on:
- non-return of the user to the search results;
- decrease in the bounce rate;
- increasing the duration of stay on the page.
Adapting a site for mobile devices will significantly increase the visibility of the site in mobile search results, and conversions from mobile devices will also increase. Simplifying navigation reduces the bounce rate. A well-designed “About us” page will increase the trust of visitors and search engines.
9. External website optimization
For whom is this relevant? For all types of sites in highly competitive topics.
Yes, in a number of topics with low competition, you can do without building up an external link mass, but in general, external optimization is necessary. The more high-quality thematic sites link to you, the more authoritative you become in the eyes of search engines.
There are many parameters by which you need to build a link profile and select donors. SEO specialists can use permalink exchanges, add natural links from forums, Q/A services, and directly post through webmasters of sites that do not sell links.
10. Increase conversion from visitors to customers
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Websites for services and products.
- News sites.
- Business card sites (not one-page sites).
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
Conversions are not necessarily sales. This can be either an order for services or a subscription to a newsletter.
In fact, this is a complex stage that requires design knowledge, usability, email marketing, and even quality content creation skills.
What does the specialist do in the first place?
- Fixes order forms.
- Adds ways to communicate with managers through the site.
- Changes the colors of page elements.
- Works with reviews.
- Sets up triggered personalized mailings.
And this is only a hundredth of the improvements that increase the conversion of the site.
11. Staged page optimization
For which projects this stage is relevant:
- Internet shops.
- Websites for services and products.
- News sites.
- Boards of announcements.
- Corporate sites.
- Forums.
Based on the ranking of pages by queries and traffic analysis by categories, SEO specialists constantly work with the site structure, expand it, make changes to texts, meta tags, internal linking, external link mass of pages. This is a long process.
Everything is complicated by the constant updating of search engine algorithms, and therefore it is often necessary to make changes to the website promotion strategy and constantly improve it for users and search engines.
conclusions
It is conditionally possible to distinguish 11 main stages of the work of an SEO specialist:
- Analysis of the client's website, topics and competitors. Formation of strategy and work plan. Relevant for all types of sites.
- Collection and clustering of semantics, formation of the primary core of search queries. Relevant for all types of sites.
- Creation of a broad site structure. Irrelevant for specific products and niche services that solve specific goals.
- Conducting an audit, the formation of a task for the technical optimization of the site. Relevant for all types of sites.
- Internal linking, increasing the internal weight of important pages for promotion. Relevant for everyone, except for small business card sites and specific products.
- Content optimization. Relevant for all types of sites.
- Working with crawl budget. Relevant for online stores, bulletin boards, services where it is possible to filter the results and sort by various parameters.
- Website usability improvement. Relevant for all types of sites.
- External optimization, working with a link profile. Not relevant for topics with low competition.
- Increasing the conversion rate from visitors to customers. Relevant for all types of sites, except forums.
- Step-by-step optimization of pages by sections, categories, implementation of improvements based on data analysis. May be irrelevant for small business card sites.
Almost all stages are not applicable to one-page sites.
Of course, there are many nuances that are beyond the scope of this review. For example, the correct transfer of the site
Any SEO specialist strongly recommends paying maximum attention to keywords or phrases. They should clearly define the theme of the site. These are not only keywords, but also synonyms and related concepts. Based on keywords, users try to find the information they need, so try to place keywords in titles, links, and the text itself. Take a look at competitors' websites, paying attention to their structure, headings, and information placed in meta tags.
Quality content
Take care of high-quality and useful content that will interest Internet users. For a web resource to be found in a search engine, the keywords in it must match the content. The optimal number of keywords is 6-7, which should harmoniously fit into the text. If the text is oversaturated with key phrases, then the search engine will exclude the resource from the search results. The site loses its significance if its pages contain information that does not match the title or keywords. This can be said about links leading to other web resources. Before publishing, it is necessary to check the content of the site for errors. It is worth paying special attention to the links: each must be checked.
html tags
Main page
Search robots will appreciate your site if it has a well-designed main page that contains all the information about the site, its description. Acquaintance with the site basically begins with the main page. It should be user-centric and easy to navigate. This will determine whether other pages will visit your site or leave it.
Links
Links are important for both users and search engines. They pay attention to the used anchors in the links. Anchors should correspond to the page they lead to. Avoid abstract phrases like "Learn more". It is better to use the title of the article or page that can be followed by a link. The importance of links in the list of search engine results depends on how clear and accurate the links will be. If we are talking about website promotion, then the link should be to a resource of a similar topic.
title tag
Use this tag on every page of your site. It should contain the name of the site and a short description with one of the keywords. When searching, the name of the page appears and, based on it, the user will decide whether your resource can contain the information he needs.
Description of pictures
Add an alt tag to each significant picture, photo or image, which will help the search engine better index the images.
description meta tag
Description is a descriptive tag. It is intended for a brief description of the content posted on the web resource. It is used by search engines to provide information about a link.
map of site
A sitemap is necessary for a search engine to index a resource, focusing on xml files. For visitors, simple and convenient navigation is a must. It is worth abandoning the graphical interface in favor of a text one.
Website for people
First of all, the site should be focused on Internet users. Web resources that are easy to use are the fastest to rank in the top 10 search results.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization, search engine optimization) is a comprehensive development and promotion of a website to reach the first position in search engine results (SERPs) for selected queries in order to increase traffic and further generate income.
The higher the position of the site in the search results, the more users go to it. Therefore, work on:
- increasing the correspondence of pages to search queries (relevance),
- structure and content optimization,
- improvement of commercial factors,
- page code optimization,
- building up external factors of the significance of the resource.
Optimization rules are set by search engines. Each of them uses and regularly updates its own ranking algorithms, which are made up of many factors. And, although the formulas are secret, experts know which factors carry the most weight. Influencing them, you can improve the position for key queries in the search results.
User behavior, interface convenience and site loading speed are extremely important for promotion results. With the development and complication of algorithms, the importance of the above factors is steadily growing, which ultimately makes search results better. Search engines strive to provide the most useful material for a user's query. Therefore, resource owners need to publish the most interesting content for its audience.
And if it works today, it is not certain that it will work tomorrow. Services are constantly changing and rebuilding. Along with them, attitudes also change.
How is SEO evolving?
SEO originated simultaneously with the emergence and development of search engines - in the mid-1990s. At that time, search engines selected resources according to a very simple principle: they took into account the words that were in the text of the pages. SEO before 1998 is keyword spam. The first search results included Internet resources with approximately the following texts: "Sneakers for sale Moscow." The search results were terrible. Most of the tops were spam.
In 1998, Google made the first SEO revolution, initiating the link period. The search service has implemented the PageRank link ranking algorithm, which calculates the weight of a page by calculating the importance of links to it. The more links to a page, the more important it is. And in 1999, Yandex announced the use of its own citation index for ordering Yandex.Catalog. TIC determines the authority of Internet resources, taking into account the qualitative characteristics of links from other Internet resources.
Under these conditions, SEO begins to develop quite rapidly. The first agencies providing website optimization services appear, the link business is born: link sellers, automatic promotion services, link exchange scripts appear.
The dawn of backlink SEO is the period 2005-2009. It was a time of large link budgets, 100% guarantees. SEO is becoming a highly profitable business.
In 2009, the second revolution took place - the introduction of machine learning algorithms into search engines. One of the best machine learning algorithms was invented in Yandex - Matrixnet. With its help, a ranking formula for the search engine of the same name is built. In fact, the machine writes the formula. Therefore, since 2009, SEO requires knowledge and hard work.
2012 is the beginning of the referenceless period. Search engines are fighting with links. In April 2012, Google launches the Penguin algorithm. It blocks Internet resources for low-quality links created by webmasters in order to influence positions. Following him, in March 2014, Yandex ceases to take into account the link factor in ranking for commercial queries. And in May 2015, Yandex introduces the Minusinsk algorithm, which periodically identifies the leaders in the purchase of links and limits them in ranking. Promotion only by buying links has become useless.
At this time, companies begin to study ranking algorithms in order to understand which factors to focus on. Various promotion models are being developed, new strategies and methods are being tested.
What is
search results today?
Site optimization
or how does SEO work?
Search engines are constantly striving to improve the quality of the issue, so it is necessary to promote the Internet resource in a comprehensive manner. This is work with the technical side, content as a decisive factor, convenience, usability, correct display on various devices and attraction of natural links.
Works are divided into two subspecies: internal and external optimization.
