SEO Promotion: A Beginner’s Guide

On the Internet today, it is almost impossible to beat competitors and get into the TOP of search engines without promotion. This article will be mega-useful even if you are not going to promote your resource yourself. You will be able to understand what promotion specialists do, speak the same language with them, analyze reports and evaluate the amount of work done.

SEO promotion or search engine optimization is a whole range of activities that is aimed at making your site appear as high as possible in the search query, which means it will attract more users. But “getting into the TOP-10 or TOP-5” is an incorrectly formulated goal, because the struggle is ultimately not for a place in the issue, but for the buyer. What is the use, if a potential client closes the page in a minute, having stumbled upon useless content, small print on a vyrviglazny color or an eerie menu? Therefore, smart SEO cares not only about the quantity, but also about the quality of traffic. We will walk you through the steps to bring your site to the favor of search engines and customers.

7 essential points for SEO work

For optimization to work, these 7 points must be met:

• Fast boot and Mobile First. Life speed is too high to spend time on a slowly loading site – it is unlikely to be one of a kind. A long download repels a large number of potential customers. Mobile adaptation is also extremely important – 61% of Internet users use smartphones search periodically, and more than a third of the total number access the network exclusively from mobile devices. It is unlikely that they will understand the non-adapted version and scroll the screen on all four sides. Even search engines provide technologies for fast mobile downloads (AMP from Google, Turbo from Yandex). People actively use voice search, and in the results you can see quick answers, competition results and chat with the company, eliminating the need to go to the site. Search engines are constantly improving,
• High value content. Now you can’t take it and just write “Husky to buy a puppy northern sled dogs bred by the Chukchi in the North-Eastern part of Siberia …” This is a direct path under the Yandex Baden-Baden filter. The keys should be implanted imperceptibly for the reader, so as not to irritate the eye, and the text itself is structured – few people want to master a solid set of words. As for the length – it depends on the page. There is clearly nothing to do with Longrida in the product category, but on the blog it is appropriate and useful for linking. Guides, reviews, expert articles make the site interesting. In addition, content is not just text. Pictures, videos, interactive inserts – all this keeps the reader on the page longer.

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• Input analytics and competitor analysis. Such monitoring does not stop. To figure out how to keep the user, and convince him to buy a product or service from you, is not an easy task. You can either take interesting ideas from your competitors and adapt to your own resource, or see mistakes – learning from others is always more pleasant.
• Endless loop of improvements. This item follows from the previous one. The rule “work – do not touch” does not apply to SEO promotion. Low-frequency and high-frequency keys affect each other, so it is important to have an idea of ​​the whole complex picture. Often, a low-frequency key will lead a warm audience, ready to buy, and people with a bold key will come for whom this will be the first touch with the product. But they will buy it in six months and, possibly, not from you.
• Technical flawlessness. Even if you have super content, half of the users may simply not reach the site due to technical errors. They need to be eradicated, especially considering that technical audit is the simplest thing that can be done to promote a resource.
• Integration with social networks. Almost every Internet user is registered in at least one social network. The relationship between search engine promotion and SMM is a topic for a separate article, but it is much stronger than it seems.
• Relevance. By going to the page, a person should receive an answer to his request. If he came at the request “brick price”, he should see the price of the brick, and not read about its advantages, manufacturing methods and three paragraphs with the content like “We sell brick, the price of which is inexpensive”. Look at the site through the eyes of the client and think about whether your answer will suit him or not.

For all approvals, it is important to choose one person with whom there will be a direct connection. If the text is agreed upon for weeks by a board of directors of 15 people, or ten secretaries will take it in turn before the general director, the chances of success will vanish.

The most important things need to be done quickly, and it doesn’t matter if there are any minor imperfections – it’s better to fix them than to do nothing at all. Be prepared for the unexpected – what has played in the promotion of one site does not necessarily prove to be working for another. Therefore, more personality, less typing.

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Technical optimization

Technical errors may not be visible to people who come to the site. But the search engines, despite all the attempts to “humanize” them, are robots. They check all the parameters, and some flaws can affect traffic. Where do errors creep in most often?

Page Indexing, Duplicates

Any promoted site should have a robots.txt file, which is located at the address meyasayta.com / robots.txt. It contains duplicate pages that generate CMS, and in particular Bitrix. Such pages have the same content, meta tags and reduce the position of the site in the display. There are various services for checking takes.

Free:

• SiteAnalyzer by Majento;
• Xenu

Paid:

• ComparseR;
• Serpstat;
• Semrush;
• Se Ranking and others.

If duplicates are found, they must be hidden from indexing using the Disallow directive, and the Allow directive displays those pages that the search engine should visit. For more information about the syntax and design rules of robots.txt, see the help https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062596?hl=en&ref_topic=6061961, https://yandex.ru/support/webmaster/controlling-robot/robots -txt.html.

sitemap.xml

Since optimization is ongoing, this file also needs to be checked periodically. It contains a “site map” for search engines, so it quickly understands which pages the resource contains. Sitemap.xml must not conflict with robots.txt.

Download speed

Nobody likes slow pages. The maximum allowable download time is 6 seconds, but the recommended one is no more than 3. These services will check the speed indicator and give recommendations for improvement:

• Google pagespeed insights;
• GTmetrix;
• WebPage test.

Failures and returns to the results are also affected by pop-ups.

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Error 404

If the page does not exist, but at the same time gives 200 a response code to the server, it is indexed by a search engine that considers it a duplicate. If everything is done correctly, then this page:

• gives the response code to the server 404;
• notifies that such a page does not exist or is out of date;
• framed in the general style of the site;
• has a site search and links to main categories.

To find such pages will help the already mentioned ComparseR.

Other server headers are worth checking out. All working pages give an answer of 200, all other answers require analysis and correction.

Semantic URL

This URL reflects the file structure of the site in human-readable words. They increase the usability of the page and allow you to guess about its contents. For clarity, we give an example:

Not clear – https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%
D0% B5% D0% BC% D0% B0% D0%
BD% D1% 82% D0% B8% D1% 87% D0%
B5 % D1% 81% D0% BA% D0% B8% D0% B9_URL

Understood – https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL

Gluing mirrors

For a person, it does not matter what to enter in the search line: the name of the site with www or without, with http or https. But the search engine believes that these are 4 different sites, so you need to select the main domain and glue all the redirects so that the system does not consider them duplicates.

https has a plus in ranking, so it makes sense to make it the primary domain. This connection protocol is protected, the SSL certificate does not allow attackers to obtain personal user data – real names, bank data, phones, so https has significant advantages.

Cross-browser compatibility and optimization for mobile devices

The site should look equally nice from any device and on the screen of any format. Mobile First suggests that the user should always see the most important thing first, and any additional information appears only at the request of the user. In addition, the site must be lightweight to load at an acceptable speed even on devices with slow internet.

You can implement this using adaptive layout, a mobile template or a mobile version on your subdomain. Great help in optimizing for smartphones is provided by plugins on designers.

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Internal optimization

Internal optimization includes everything related to the semantics, content and usability of the site. To conduct it, you need to assemble a semantic core, write meta tags, bring content to life, and optimize commercial components for selling resources.

Semantic core collection

The semantic core is the three whales on which the site stands. In a good way, it should be assembled at the development stage, then you can correctly think through the navigation and internal structure. But this is a scenario for an ideal site in a vacuum, but in reality, more often the kernel is already assembled for a finished resource, and the structure is adjusted for it.

Gathering your SY is one of the most important stages, because the number of potential customers who come to them on the site will depend on how effectively you select keywords. In addition to Wordstat, you can use other paid and free services to collect semantics.

Free:

• Google Keyword Planner is a Google counterpart, it is less convenient, but sometimes it can help to collect keys that are not in the Wordstat.

Paid much more:

• Serpstat and Semrush are two similar SEO optimization services. The latter is better to use if you need to promote the site abroad, on Google.
• Mutagen – not only collects keys, but also determines their competitiveness.
• Moab Tools is a technically simple service that allows you to collect many requests in a short time.
• Key Collector is a cool paid platform that collects keys from all significant services, ours and foreign, including those listed above.

Collecting keys is half the battle, then you need to throw out the extra ones that will be there anyway. All requests that are not related to the site should not be in the semantic core. Returning to bricks – if you are promoting a brick manufacturer, then fans of the same group are not your target audience.

Clustering

When all keys are collected, they need to be grouped. The clustering process is designed to turn chaos from hundreds of search queries into a single ordered structure. In the past, all this was done manually and could take more than one month, but now with the help of special services it takes a couple of hours for everything:

• SEMparcer;
• KeyAssort;
• Rush Analytics.

What happens if clustering is not done? Duplicates are created as a result of cannibalization, extra content, and positions in the results are lost.

Meta tags

Correct meta tags will attract the attention of users to your resource and affect an indicator such as clickability. The snippet has 2 parts: title and description. Title is the title of the page that is displayed in the search results. A good title includes the most high-frequency key, possibly two, and the USP, and all this must be put in 70 characters. Of course, you can go beyond these limits, but then the title will not be shown completely, so the high-frequency request must go first so that it is visible.

Description is a longer description of the page from which a person can understand how useful it is. It includes less frequent keys that were not used in the title, respectively, they differ from each other. Description length one hundred characters longer – 160-170.

Many people don’t fill out the keywords meta tag at all now, because it has practically no effect on promotion. But it’s better to score a couple of keywords there.

Read also: Performance Marketing: 10 Tips for 2020

With quick optimization, you don’t need to look for extraordinary queries, especially if there are a lot of similar pages, templates will work for the first time – and if you want, they can always be optimized in the future.

Clickability

CTR – the very clickability – is the formula for the ratio of user clicks to impressions in the SERP. The more they click, the higher the page. Is everything simple? Not by that much. This works as long as the page is relevant to the query. If she does not answer him, the user will close the site almost immediately, increasing the number of failures. CTR is displayed in Google Search Console.

Text Content Optimization

The text on the landing page should match the user’s query in the search bar. For this, key phrases and words are used in it, including those that have already attracted the attention of a person in the title and description. There is another side – the danger of over-optimization, which will lead the page under the filter. To prevent this from happening, you need to observe the frequency of key use – no more than 4%, ideally 2-3%. You can check this indicator on services advego.com ,istio.com . In addition to it, you will receive data on nausea, water content of text and other SEO data.

The overall risk of a page falling under the Baden-Baden filter can be assessed on the service turgenev.ashmanov.com . Unfortunately, since December 2019, you need to pay money for checks, only the “Stylistics” tab remains free. But 200 checks per month cost 200 p., And without a subscription, text up to 20 thousand characters will cost only 5 p.

What is required of attractive text?

• Uniqueness. Search engines love texts with high uniqueness, from 90%. You can check it on resources such as text.ru ,content-watch.ru (3 free checks per day), using the Advego Plagiatus program. Unfortunately, this indicator is not a constant value, it is worth someone to copy and put your text on another resource, and at least a quote – the uniqueness uncontrollably falls. It can be adjusted and unique, but keep in mind that the constant updating of articles on the site and the absence of technical errors are more important.
• Structure. Almost no one reads long “sheets” without paragraphs and subheadings. It is desirable to use lists in the text – remember, back in school, tables and lists were remembered and perceived much easier than a lengthy paragraph.
• Usefulness and interestingness: Texts for search engines worked 10 years ago, and now everything is strongly tied to behavioral factors, so the site needs to try to keep the user interested in the article and make it climb the site.
• The content of keywords.

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External optimization

This is a reference mass. If the site is filled with useful and interesting content, then search engines consider it an authoritative and reliable resource and promote it up in the search results. At the same time, it is important which sites link to it – a dubious link mass is more likely to make it worse. This is exactly the case when quality is more important than quantity.

The most “correct” way is to write useful articles, increasing the credibility of the resource, so that people take away links and post them at home. But it is a long way. What are the options to increase the link mass faster?

1. Buy. There are special exchanges for this, where owners of other resources offer to host your link for money. Search engines consider it wrong, track and punish.

2. Arrange directly. This method is more expensive both in terms of resources and in terms of finances, but the link mass is better.

3. Crowd marketing. You can post links on the sites of questions and answers, forums, social networks. But there are some nuances. Such a link should be placed on a resource with relevant topics and be organically inscribed in a comment. Posting a link for the sake of the link is a failure. In addition, after posting, you need to track other people’s comments, and if they ask questions, answer them. In many forums, the newly created user cannot insert links, and it looks strange. There are paid crowdfunding services, and for free such tasks can often be found on exchanges with a wide specialization, for example, at www.workzilla.ru and the like.

Before engaging in link building, you should analyze your competitors. So you will know:

• how many links they have in total, and how many appear monthly;
• which sources to which pages link;
• what links in what percentage: anchor or non-anchor.

Commercial ranking factors

Such factors in SEO influence the position in the issuance of those resources that sell goods or services. Here are the basic data that should be on the site:

• Company contacts. There must be at least telephones and an address. All that is “above” – additional contacts, location map, warehouse address, only increases the level of trust of search engines.
• Lack of advertising. Search engines have a negative attitude towards advertising banners, and pop-ups with ads increase the number of user failures. Are you selling something? That’s what you earn.

• Social network. The more a company is registered in more popular social networks, the more subscribers it has and the more “lively” a group is, the more the search engine respects the site.
• Wide range of. It is clear that not every site can offer a variety of products. Nevertheless, those who do this get a plus for ranking.
• Detailed product card. Even if there are few goods, the card should contain a maximum of information. Material, dimensions, color, photo, description, reviews, availability and delivery information. A separate bonus will be 3D-visualizers, calculators, video and other interactive.
• Delivery, a variety of its options and the ability to organize anywhere.

• Ability to contact the client. The site should have a section with the help of frequently asked questions, a form for communicating with an online consultant.
• Simple and catchy domain, human-readable URL.
• Relevance. The site should give a clear and accurate answer to the question.
• Local binding. If a hairdresser works in Voronezh, it should not be shown throughout Russia. To do this, you need to assign a region to Yandex.Webmaster or Yandex.Directory. You cannot directly specify the region in Google, but so that it can identify it, you can write the city in meta tags, enter it in the content and add the site to Google My Business.

Some of the points from this guide will not cause you any difficulties, but some require a deeper immersion in the topic of SEO and its study.