25, Aug 2022
Page optimization

Page optimization


Once you have a list of keywords, the next step is to embed targeted keywords into your site’s content. Each page should be focused on the main query or group of queries.

Let’s take a look at a few important basic page elements that are essential if you want to drive targeted traffic to your site:

Title


This tag helps search engines understand the actual meaning of the page, what it is about, and also recognizes the queries you want to rank for. And this is the most effective place to place your keywords. But do not forget that Yandex and Google still punish aggressive and manipulative use of keywords.

The Title tag is not the main title of your page. The title you see on the page is usually an H1 (or possibly H2) HTML element. The Title tag is what you see at the very top of the browser, and it’s populated with the page’s source code in the meta tag:

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The length of a Title that is shown on Google will vary (it’s based on pixels, not character count), but 55-60 characters on average is the ideal size in practice.

In the case of Yandex, the optimal length of the Title tag is 65-70 characters. In this case, the length and occurrence of the key query that makes up the title text plays an important role.

When composing the Title, remember that this is what the user sees in the search results, what gets into the snippet.

The title should give an answer to the main intent of the user, not break off in half a word and be written in human language, and not “Buy DVR Moscow”.

Description


While the Title tag is actually your site’s title in the SERPs, the Description (another HTML meta element that can be updated in the site’s code but not appear on the page) is actually additional advertising for the site.

Google takes some liberties with what to display in a snippet, so your meta description may not always appear. Instead, Google’s crawler can rip out the piece of content that it thinks best fits the description of the page.

But if you can write an attractive page description that convinces people to click on the link, then you can significantly increase traffic to the site. (Remember: appearing in search results is only the first step! You still need search engines to come to your site.)

Example Description in Google search engine:

Description example in the Yandex search engine:

Body. Page content


Of course, in addition to the meta description (Title and Description), the actual content of the page itself is also important. Different pages serve different purposes.

Google and Yandex are increasingly favoring certain types of content, and there are a few things to keep in mind when creating any of the pages on your site:

Extensive and unique content. There is no magic number in terms of word count, and if you have multiple pages of content on your site with a few hundred words, you won’t lose favor with the search engines. But more often, longer unique content is preferred.
If you have a large number of very short (50-200 words) pages or a lot of duplicate content where nothing changes except for the title tag of the page, this can negatively affect the position of the site. Look at your site as a whole: is a large percentage of your pages skinny, duplicated, and of little value or low demand? If yes, try to find a way to “make” these pages better, full of content. Check your analytics to see how much traffic these pages are getting, and simply exclude them (using the noindex meta tag) from search results so that search engines don’t think you’re trying to flood their index with lots of low-value pages in an attempt to rank them up.

A tool for webmasters will help you find low-value and low-quality pages on the site. For example, Yandex Webmaster will help you find such pages through Indexing, then Pages in the search, here we select Excluded pages, in the Status filter we select the necessary parameters, in our case, a low-value or low-demand page.

Involvement. Search engines, especially Google, are paying more and more attention to engagement and user experience metrics. You can positively influence these indicators by making sure that your content responds to the user’s request, it (the content) is really useful, interesting and can be interacted with. Make sure the pages load quickly and don’t contain unnecessary design elements or, for example, overly aggressive ads above the content.
“Sharability” or “sharing capability”, i.e. the ability to share this specific content on social networks

Alt Attributes


The way you mark up your images can affect not only how search engines perceive your page, but also the amount of search traffic generated by image searches on your site.

The alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if the user cannot view it. Your images can break over time (files get deleted, users can’t connect to the site, etc.), so a useful image description can be important in terms of overall usability. It also gives you another opportunity – beyond the content – to help search engines understand what the page is about.

It is not at all necessary to “stuff” with Alt keywords. Just don’t skip it and try to give a complete and accurate description of the image (imagine describing it to someone who can’t see it – that’s what the Alt attribute is really for!). You can read more about the ATL and title attributes for images in the Yandex help.

URL structure


The structure of your site’s URL can be important both in terms of tracking (you can more easily segment data in reports using a segmented logical URL structure) and in terms of being able to share the URL of the page (shorter descriptive URLs are easier to copy and paste and tend to be erroneously cropped less often). Once again: don’t try to cram in as many keywords as possible; create a short, descriptive URL.

What’s more: if you don’t have to, don’t change your URLs. Even if your URLs aren’t “beautiful”, if you don’t see them negatively impacting users and businesses in general, don’t change them to be more keyword-focused for “better SEO”. If you really need to change the URL structure, make sure you are using the correct 301 page redirect. This is a common mistake that companies make when changing the design of their sites, we have a separate cool article on this topic: “Website redesign or how to maintain your ranking in search engines without losing positions and traffic”.

25, Aug 2022
Search and distribution of keywords

Search and distribution of keywords


The first step in search engine optimization is to correctly identify what you are actually optimizing for. This means identifying the queries people are searching for or the keywords you want your site to rank for in search engines.

Sounds simple enough, right? I want my company to show up in searches when people search for “dvrs” and maybe when they type in “buy dashcam”.

But in fact, not everything is as simple as it seems. There are several key factors to consider when determining the keywords for which you want to promote your site:

Search volume. The first factor to consider is the number of people (if any) who search for a given keyword. The more people who search for a keyword, the wider the audience you want to reach. Conversely, if no one searches for a key, then there is no audience that could find your content using the search.
Relevance. If a product or service is frequently searched for, that’s great. But what if that query isn’t entirely relevant to your potential customers?
Relevance seems obvious at first: if you’re selling enterprise email marketing automation software, you don’t want to show up for search terms that have nothing to do with your business, like “pet products.” But, besides this, you should take into account for which companies you sell your product, in which territory and other equally important factors.

Competition. In SEO, too, you must consider the potential costs and likelihood of success. For SEO, this means understanding the relative competition (and likelihood of ranking) for specific terms.
First, you need to understand who your potential customers are and what they are most likely to be looking for. If you don’t yet understand who your audience is, think about it. This is a good start not only for SEO, but for business in general.

To better understand your audience, ask a few questions:

What interests them?
What are their problems?
What language do they use to describe needs, enter a request?
Who else do they buy things or services from? (These may be your competitors. But, in addition, the answer to this question may provide indirect clues in determining your target audience).
Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have an initial “basic list” of possible keywords and domains. This list will help you get more keywords, search volume, and competition metrics.

Take a list of the main terms your prospects and clients use to describe what you do and start typing them into your keyword tools. For example, Yandex has a Wordstat word selection tool.

Serpstat has a convenient and functional keyword analysis tool:

You can use various keyword suggestion tools, but the basic idea is that at the initial stage, you will need to try to collect the maximum number of the most relevant keywords and expressions.

If you already have an active site, then most likely you are already receiving some traffic from search engines. The Yandex Webmaster Tool can also provide hints when working with requests:

or track the statistics of search queries on the site in the appropriate section:

Query statistics can also be tracked in the Google Search Console:

For extended collection of semantics, not only for high-frequency queries, but also for mid- and low-frequency queries, Key Collector is perfect. In addition to collecting keywords, you can safely use this program for clustering.

After you understand who your potential customers are, what they are looking for and how they enter a request; Having analyzed the keywords that bring traffic to competitors and studied the queries that attract traffic, you need to determine by what criteria your site can rank and where to focus your SEO efforts.

25, Aug 2022
What really helps to increase traffic from search engines?

What really helps to increase traffic from search engines?


TOP-10 search engines (at the end of the 20th year):

Google – 53.9% (73.5 million hits)
Yandex — 43.1% (58.7 million hits)Rambler – 0.1% (181 thousand clicks)
Bing – 0.1% (147k hits)
Tut.by – 0.01% (12 thousand clicks)
Yahoo – 0.001% (6.5 thousand clicks)
The share of traffic is now divided between search engines in approximately the same ratio, but Yandex and Google are invariably in the lead. Therefore, most seo-specialists usually focus on them. To get into the search results of these two search engines, you need to understand the basic principles of their algorithms and the principles of ranking sites.

Search engine algorithms are constantly updated, and every year it becomes more and more difficult to get to the top of the results and keep your positions there. And many cheap and easy ways to improve your rankings have become extremely risky and face sanctions from search engines.

So what works? How do Google and Yandex determine which pages to return in response to what people are looking for? How to get all this valuable traffic to your website?

Google’s algorithm is extremely complex, and here are the basic principles it uses to rank websites:

Google looks for pages that contain quality and relevant information about the user’s query.
It determines relevancy by “scanning” your site’s content and evaluating (using algorithms) whether that content matches what the user is looking for, typically based on the keywords it contains.
Google defines the “quality” of a site in many different ways, but it’s still important to Google the quantity and quality of other websites that link to your page and to your site as a whole.
The Google algorithm also evaluates additional elements to determine where your site will rank, such as:

How do people interact with your site (do they find the information they need and stay on the site, or do they return to the search page and follow another link? Or do they just ignore you in the search results?)
Your website loading speed and mobile friendliness
How much unique content do you have (versus low value content or duplicate content)
The Google algorithm considers hundreds of ranking factors in response to search queries, and they are constantly updating and improving their process.

Ranking factors in Yandex largely overlap with Google factors. But there are also some peculiarities. So in 2021, Yandex named the main parameters using the example of online stores:

the Yandex quality index (QI) is still decisive;
voice search;
physical quantities of the HTML code;
the number of quality pages in the index;
the quality and number of links that lead to a third-party resource;
quality of incoming links;
the presence of the resource in social networks;
the number of transitions from the search and behavioral factors – presence time, browsing depth, number of bounces and last click;
ALT attributes and the number of words in each of them;
the quality of domains that link to your site;
site visits;
number of words in internal links;
the number of direct visits to the resource;
website presence on YouTube;
the number of clicks from social networks and mail.
The good news is that you don’t have to be an SEO expert to rank high in search results. We’ll look at proven website optimization techniques to help you drive targeted traffic through search.

25, Aug 2022
What is SEO and why is it important?

You must have heard of SEO. And if you haven’t heard, then you could just read the definition of the term on Wikipedia. But understanding that SEO is “a set of measures for internal and external optimization to raise the position of a site in the search engine results for certain user queries” will not really help solve the problems of your business and site. For example:

How to optimize your site or client’s site for search engines?
How to increase your site’s organic visibility so that users can easily find content?
How do you know how much time to spend on SEO?
How can you tell “good” SEO advice from “bad” or even “harmful” ones?
And what you will definitely wonder as a business owner or employee is how you can effectively use SEO to drive more relevant website traffic, leads, sales, and ultimately revenue and profit for your business. This is what we want to focus on in our guide.

Why should you pay attention to SEO?


Billions of people search the internet every day. Organic traffic is extremely powerful, not only because it is large in terms of quantity, but also because it consists of specific requests, often containing certain content.

Let’s imagine a situation. For example, you sell video recorders. Would you prefer to advertise your product on a billboard in a certain area of ​​the city so that every car owner in that area sees this advertisement (regardless of whether they need a DVR or not)? Or offer a product every time someone types the query: “buy a dash cam” in the search bar? Most likely the second option, because these users have commercial intent in their request. That is, they literally stand up and say they want to buy what you offer.