The impact of internal optimization on successful website promotion in search engines. Part 1

This article talks about how important it is to conduct a comprehensive internal optimization of the site and what needs to be done in order to ensure the successful promotion of web resources in search engines. Performed in accordance with all the requirements of search engines optimization will be the guarantor of good visibility of the site in search results and, as a result, a steady stream of targeted visitors.

The article is intended primarily for people who are engaged in or plan to start creating and promoting a website on the Internet, but do not know where to start or how to do everything correctly. I will tell you about the most basic steps that need to be taken at the beginning of the journey.

The given data is, of course, well known to the professional SEO community, but we would be also interested in the comments of specialists.
')
Although we tried to formulate everything briefly and in the case, the material was still quite voluminous. I publish its first part. Following the second and third parts.

Prehistory

Internal site optimization has always been quite important in the success of the company called "site promotion." But, at different times, the degree of its influence and the methods used changed. If you exaggerate, then 8-10 years ago the main task of the optimizers was to saturate the pages with the right keywords and in the right places and this was often enough for success. And since about 2006, the era of the kingdom of references has come, when various exchanges for buying links have entered the life of optimizers, ranging from CLX (someone else probably remembers this name) and ending with Sape. It was the latter that made a real revolution in technology advancement. The deciding factor for getting the site to the TOP (first page) of the search results was the reference budget: the more - the better. Site optimization, of course, also played a certain role at that time, but much less significant than it should have been.

Link boom created a real headache for search engines, since the degree of manipulation of search results exceeded all imaginable limits and sites that were very far from perfect began to hit the top of search results. In other words, the search quality has deteriorated, and this is the main product of search engines. Against this background, the flagship of the Russian search Yandex began quite rapidly to lose its market share.

As a result, over the past 2 years, Yandex has greatly changed the principles of ranking sites, and against the background of a significant reduction in the influence of reference factors, factors of internal optimization and behavioral factors have become important. Behavioral factors require a separate article, this time we will limit ourselves to questions of internal optimization, especially since its competent implementation also provides good indicators on behavioral factors.

The main elements of internal site optimization

Internal website optimization today is a symbiosis of correctly executed:

• keyword matching
• site structure and link structure
• of texts
• technological foundation
• Html code
• meta descriptions of pages

Properly working out all these elements as a result will help to create such a site that will be equally useful to the target audience and enjoy the search engine. Below we take a closer look at each of them.

Keyword Selection

Any site promotion begins with the selection of key phrases. Make such a list for yourself and later use it when designing the structure of the site and drawing up texts for it.
The most convenient and correct tool for selecting keywords today is the services embedded in Yandex.Direct: word selection and budget estimator for advertising campaigns, which is available in the Direct management interface under any account. In the first case, you can view the statistics on keywords separately, and in the right column you can see synonyms that users usually request along with the main queries you specified.



The second tool, in fact, performs the same functions, but it is more convenient to work with it to create ready-made keyword lists. First, in the “Keywords” block, specify more general phrases describing your business, then in the right-hand column “Hints” you will be shown words and phrases that are also frequently requested by users on the subject of your phrases. By clicking on these phrases you can immediately add them to your general list. To then get this list in a single file and immediately with the query statistics, you will need to use the “export to XLS” function - it will appear after you click the “Add” button after selecting key phrases.



As a result, you will receive a file of approximately this type - a list of key phrases with data on their popularity and estimated level of competitiveness (at an average cost per click).

Site structure

The first thing to start working with the site is to design its structure. The following main structural components are usually divided:

• general information sections
• catalog of services / products
• reference and auxiliary sections

General information sections

General information sections are found on almost any site - this is: Company, News, Shipping, Contacts, Testimonials, Portfolio, Support, and so on. That is, they tell some obligatory things about the company. The impact of such sections on search engine promotion is not so significant, but they must be due to the fact that their presence will allow the search engine to more accurately identify your company and allow interested visitors to get primary information about you.

Catalog of goods / services

The product / service catalog is the most important part of the site both for your potential clients and in terms of promotion - it is here that the main array of keywords will be used and maintained to promote the site that you have previously selected. The ideal case is when directory sections are placed in a separate block of the site menu hierarchy and already at the top level contain links to the main sections, that is, they are accessible from any page of the website, including the main one. It is very important that the section titles contain keywords that describe your business, and not be too general (Our services, Products, etc.).

Special pages for quick access to information

It will be very good if to help the user you will create special pages with a quick selection of products or ready-made solutions. The headings of such pages may also contain key phrases that are popular with search engine users.

Reference sections

Reference sections, while not strictly commercial, can nevertheless attract a significant amount of traffic, which ultimately improves behavioral factors. Such sections may include various data on state standards, terms, extracts from legislation, information about countries (for travel agencies) and much more. Auxiliary sections include, for example, various calculators.

Key request - site page

Consider also which pages from your structure for which key phrases will be promoted. Make a list of "request - page" - so it will be easier for you to plan a site. Ideally, it is desirable to observe the principle of “one request - one page” In practice, this is not always the case, but at least you should strive for this and not allow the promotion of one page on a dozen keywords with different services. The best implementation is when each service or each product will have its own separate page. Strive to follow this principle even when you are used to using a single price list for all products and plan to place it within one page. In this case, create such a page with a single list, but be sure to organize from it links to individual pages for each item in your price list.

Subtotal

To summarize, you can define the basic requirements for building the structure of the site, plus give some more important recommendations:

• The structure should be linear, clear and understandable to the visitor.
• Any page should be accessible through links with the main one in 2-3 clicks, a deeper level is in principle acceptable, but only low-frequency phrases can be promoted to them.
• The menu items should be arranged in tags lists LI and be made in the form of texts
• Use the principle of "one keyword - one page" and "one service / product - one page".

Text on the site

Text content of the site is one of the most important components of all optimization. If the search engine does not find the requested keyword on the page you are promoting, it will not be included in the search results. Therefore, if you intend to promote any page for a keyword phrase, make sure that this keyword is found in the text of the site (not only in the title of the section).

The volume of the text at the moment are not of paramount importance. Fully suitable articles with a capacity of 500 characters. A much more important requirement is the uniqueness of the content. If you use texts from publicly available sources, which, moreover, are already used by your competitors, then this is a direct path to nowhere - after all, search engines today have learned quite correctly how to determine duplicates and primary sources of text content. Accordingly, if the pages of your site are recognized as duplicates, then the key phrases used to promote these pages will not show the site in the search results, or will initially occupy low positions.

So try to pay as much attention as possible to writing a unique text. In this case, you can not save, if you can not do this work or you do not have your own people who could do it - engage third-party copywriters. Quite high-quality texts today can be obtained from 300 rubles per 1000 characters.

Try to use the following guidelines when composing texts:

• Write about what is really necessary and interesting for people, do not “pour” water
• Use subheadings and lists in which you place keywords in your texts.
• Actively supply texts with links to other pages of your site, whether promoted or not, directly from the text phrases of the section, if they are suitable for this purpose.
• Typeset the text so that it is easy to read. The simplest actions that will help with this: limit the amount of text in one paragraph, indent between paragraphs, dilute text with images, subtitles with lists.

In the following materials we will describe how to properly prepare the technological foundation of the site, as well as review the online services that are useful during the site optimization phase.

The described rules have been developed and tested on websites produced using the web-canape technology . Our partner Andrey Zaitsev ( icom-promo ) helped to collect, formulate and implement these rules, for which he thanks a lot.

For convenience, I give a link to a file , according to which we check websites for SEO correctness, before uploading to hosting and transferring to a client.