Promotion of the site in Yahoo and Google search engines: how to get to the TOP

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If your site is on the first page of the output, readers and customers will find you on their own. This is the point of site promotion in search engines. You get targeted visitors without large investments in advertising. And it happens all the time - every day.

However, there are not enough places on the front pages for everyone. Yahoo and Google only let in quality sites - those that meet their requirements and the interests of their users. Therefore, you will have to fight for a place in the top. Especially for popular queries.

In this article, we'll break it down:

• How to make a website that can get to the top;
• what the content on the site should be;
• what you need to consider when promoting;
• what mistakes should not be made in order not to lose positions in search.

What does the success of the promotion depend on?

Search engines evaluate a site comprehensively. If it is convenient and useful for the user, if readers stay there for a long time and return, the site rises in search. But slow sites with inconvenient navigation and unreliable articles will not make it to the top.

There are hundreds of individual promotion factors. Even the information about the company in the "Contacts" section affects its position in search - the more complete, the better. Some factors are known only to Yahoo and Google employees. Moreover, they change: new ones are added, and the "weight" of old ones is reduced or increased.

Several of the most important groups of factors can be distinguished:

1. Design, usability of the site for a person. A convenient online store, in which it is easy to place an order, is better than a complex cluttered site. A blog with large text and clear fonts is better than a blog with "sheets" of small text. And so it is in everything. Look at your site through the eyes of a visitor.
2. Compliance with technical requirements. The code should be correctly written, the site loading speed should be high. There should not be identical and empty pages, incorrect links. Search engines love sites that display equally well in all browsers, on all devices (computers, smartphones, tablets). A website should look good on any screen
3. Useful content - articles, product descriptions, etc. Reliable and unique materials quickly bring the site to the first positions in the search.

All of this affects behavioral factors. Behavioral factors are the time a visitor spends on the site, depth of browsing, bounce rate, clicks on internal links, clicks in the output, the number of direct visits to the site (e.g., from browser bookmarks), and so on. They show how interesting and important the site is to users.

To emphasize one thing to the detriment of the rest will not work. Useful materials will not pull the site to the top, if the technical component of the trouble. Therefore, it is necessary to develop the site as a whole.

Collect a semantic core

Semantic core is a complete list of all the key queries for which you will promote the site. On the basis of the kernel make the structure of the site. That's why it's better to put it together right away, even before the development begins.

There may be many key queries - several thousand. And the largest online stores and information portals are promoted by hundreds of thousands of key phrases. The queries are different:

• Commercial and informational. For example, queries with the words "buy", "order", "price", "wholesale" are commercial. People type them in when they want to buy a product or order a service. One page cannot be promoted for both commercial and informational queries at once - this must be taken into account.
• High-, medium- and low-frequency queries. High-frequency queries - those that are typed into the search most often. They are difficult to get to the top, but if you succeed, the attendance of your site will increase dramatically. But for low- and medium-frequency queries to rise in the search is easier. And if there will be a lot of them in your semantic core, you will again get a lot of targeted visitors.
• Geo-dependent and geo-independent. Geo-dependent queries vary by region. If a person from New-York searches for barbershops on Yahoo, they will see information about barbershops in New-York, not Detroit or Washington. But for geo-dependent queries, the results are the same for people from all regions.

The more extensive semantic kernel, the more queries will be able to promote the site in search engines. However, artificially inflate the semantic kernel is not worth it. If the site will not be relevant to part of the queries, Yahoo and Google will leave it far in the output.

How do you do that?

If you have a small site, you can collect the core manually. After collecting queries should be filtered: exclude those that should not find your site. For example, if you sell tourist tours, you certainly do not need requests for a wilderness vacation. Non-targeted queries will have to be selected manually - some may not be obvious.

Then you need to determine which pages and for which queries and query groups you will promote. Distribute the collected queries to specific pages and sections. This is called clustering. If you plan to create an informational section or blog, you should consider what articles and queries you will publish there.

It is long and difficult to compile a semantic kernel, but it is necessary. Without a core, systematic promotion in search is impossible.

Create a user-friendly, modern website

If a site has a confusing structure, ill-conceived blocks, complicated navigation, the visitor will leave. That's what a website should be:

• all necessary pages: home, contacts, services, goods, 404 error;
• simple and clear menus;
• easy search;
• easy-to-read fonts in large sizes;
• convenient subscription forms, order buttons;
• interactive blocks (e.g. sliders with the most popular or suitable for a particular customer products, blog posts, etc.);
• "Share" buttons that make it easy to send your content to social media.

This is a sample list. The final one depends on the type of your site, its purpose. For example, in an online store it is important to make simple and informative product cards with the option to buy in one click. And the online consultant system is also a great help - it is often easier for people to write to an operator in chat than to call.

Remember that you are making a site for people. It will be visited by your potential clients and customers. There is no room for personal preferences: a bunch of unnecessary "niceties" and bulky pictures in the "header" will only scare away visitors.

Create quality content

Content should be:

• relevant - match the keyword query and fully cover the topic;
• useful - to give visitors the information they came for;
• reliable - do not contain semantic errors, outdated information, untruths;
• unique - contain something important, which is not found in other materials and on other sites on this topic;
• readable - easy to understand, well-structured (divided into semantic blocks with subheadings and paragraphs, with lists, tables, etc.);
• optimized - contain key phrases that will be used to search for it in search engines (but the "keys" should not be too many, and they should be inserted into the text organically).

People should find answers to their questions on your site. If you provide services, tell them in detail, about the terms and conditions, about what the client will get. If you sell goods, put together a good assortment, make informative product cards, clear descriptions. If you blog, write reliable articles and provide valuable unique insights.

Dilute the text with media materials. This includes photos, graphics and infographics, thematic videos, animations, and interactive elements. Remember the principle of "nothing extra": add only what makes your content fuller, clearer and more useful.

Distribute content

If you have created a convenient site and fill it with useful content, the positions in the output will grow little by little. However, you can speed up this process.

1. Distribute your materials: make announcements in social networks, use email newsletters, negotiate publications on third-party platforms.
2. Start a blog and write about what your audience is interested in. Use current news stories, write about solutions to pressing problems.

Use SEO tags

Tags help search engine robots navigate your site. This speeds up the indexing (recognition) of pages by robots, making it more accurate. There are many tags, but we are interested in a few:

SEO tags need to be prescribed for each page.

Track analytics

You can't do without the services of the search engines themselves:

They make it easy to track everything about indexing and ranking sites in search engines:

• number of indexed pages (should be approximately equal to the number of all pages on the site);
• traffic (site visitors): general and mobile, its sources;
• social metrics: bounce rate, time on site, depth of browsing, returns;
• the most popular publications, etc.

There are third-party services and programs for more advanced analysis. Most of them are paid.

Useful tips

1. Organize internal relinking. Relinking is the connection of different pages of the site links to each other. Usually links include directly in the text. Relinking helps to increase the "weight" pages of the site in the eyes of search engines. Visitors will also say thank you - they will be easier to navigate on the site.
2. Update the site regularly. Add products, make new publications. This will prove to search engines that the site is developing. But to publish a lot of everything at once, and then forget about updates for a year - you can not.
3. Increase download speeds.
4. Make a Sitemap file. This will help search engine robots index your site faster.
5. Customize the 404 error page.
6. Close the service pages of the site from indexing.

Mistakes that lead to the imposition of sanctions

In the past, promotion specialists often tried to trick search engines. Now "gray" and "black" methods do not work. And if they do, they don't work for long and with bad consequences.

Yahoo and Google have a system of filters. Filters recognize violations and abuses committed during search engine promotion. For serious violations search engines penalize: reduce the position of the site or exclude it from the output. This is what will lead to being subject to filters:

1. Massive purchase of links. Previously, search engines assessed the quality of the site by the number of links to it, located on other sites. After all, if the resource is good, it is logical that it will be referenced. As a result, optimizers began to simply purchase external links to promote the site to the top. However, now Yahoo and Google distinguish "natural" links from purchased links. Natural ones help in promotion, bought ones do not. And a sharp increase in the number of links to the site immediately attracts the attention of search engines.
2. Behavioral factor spoofing. While search engines have a hard time fighting it, but they are getting better at it. There are many ways to nakruktya - all can not tell. You can not use them.
3. Overoptimization. Remember uninformative texts where key phrases are almost in every sentence? Search engines don't like that. "Keys" should be inserted organically, not to the detriment of the content, readability and common sense.
4. Content theft. You can't copy an article you like and post it without providing a link to the original source.
5. A lot of annoying advertising. Pop-up windows, a lot of teasers and banners, advertising of dubious goods - all these are minuses to the karma of the site.

Do not try to cheat search engines and do not listen to unscrupulous specialists who offer to do it. The price of a mistake is great. You can get kicked out of the search - and all your hard work is for nothing.

Useful services

• Serpstat is a multifunctional service: it helps you analyze rendition, monitor competitors, research the market and build many reports;
• Megaindex - helps you partially automate your search promotion;
• SpyWords - tells you which keywords your competitors are using to promote their sites in search and how successfully;
• Top-Inspector and AllPosition - will show the positions of your site on the promoted queries;

Search engine promotion - it's long, but effective

Promotion in search is a complex matter. You have to keep track of everything at once: clean code, optimize pages, create useful content, and don't forget about analytics. There are no quick results here. Promotion for the most competitive queries can take a year or two or more.

Some things are difficult to do without a professional. However, for the most part, everything depends on you. Make good content, understand the interests and needs of visitors, develop the site and do not rely on miracle methods - it is in your hands. Get ready for hard work - and the site will definitely get to the top of the output, and you will get more and more customers from search engines.