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Advanced internal SEO for e-commerce



Among IT professionals there are different opinions regarding SEO. Someone negatively regards this, and someone considers a good tool. But a negative attitude towards SEO usually develops due to its inept use. With proper and appropriate use of this means of promotion can bring a lot of benefits without causing user dissatisfaction. One of the aspects of SEO - its internal use - was devoted to the speech of Artem Gidin, the head of the SEO-division of Web-Promo , at the Kiev partner conference "1C-Bitrix" last fall.

Let's talk about why you should turn to SEO. SEO is an online marketing direction aimed at promoting products that are already in demand. That is, SEO - this is not the tool that works on the formation of demand. If you already have products or services for sale that are interesting to people and that you already know about, then SEO is the right direction to take. For many companies, SEO gives the lion's share of all traffic that comes to the site. And this is one of the most important reasons why you need to pay attention to the promotion of sites in search engines.

Each search engine uses ranking factors to generate search results. Google, for example, has about 200 of them. Yandex has about 1000 factors built on the logic of machine learning.
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SEO pyramid


The factors mentioned can be assembled into a so-called SEO pyramid. The first level of the pyramid is the site and content:



For successful promotion, the site must meet a number of criteria, divided into categories:


Technical condition


"Technical condition" combines four basic requirements:


Let's look at each of these points.

Current working structure


Often, e-commerce sites have a rather complex hierarchy, many pages, many products. What is meant by working structure?


Availability


The site should always be available. If you save on hosting and the site will periodically "lie down" due to maintenance, the search engine, when confronted with this, will downgrade the site. And this is quite important. Therefore, do not save on a hosting plan and choose proven hosting providers.

No duplicate pages


If the site has the same pages with different addresses, this will also adversely affect the ranking by the search engine. This is expressed in the fact that none of the duplicates will fall into search results.

Filter Optimization


Filters serve as entry points that attract low frequency traffic. For example, on your site there is a category "laptops". To get to the top search results for this query is very difficult, almost impossible: the competition is very high. Let you have filters "gaming laptops", "laptops for work", laptops for something else. And by such requests it is already much easier to get to the top. If the filters are optimized, then you can attract low-frequency and even mid-frequency traffic in search results.

Index


The index is the base of the search engine where the pages of your site are stored. They are divided into "useful" and "useless" by the system. The more “useful” pages there are, the better for you. "Useless" pages worsen the rating of the site in the database.

If we enter site: site.ua in Google, we get the total number of pages in the index corresponding to this request.



Turning to the last page of pagination, you will see an alert that not all results and not all pages that the search engine sees are considered useful.



Clicking on the link "Show hidden results" will display those pages that from the point of view of the search engine carry a minimum of usefulness and semantic load. This is the so-called sub-index. And you must ensure that your site has as few pages as possible in this index. Useless pages usually include those that:


Help in work


For communication with webmasters, Google and Yandex have two excellent and fairly simple tools: www.google.com/webmasters/tools and https://webmaster.yandex.ru . If you register your site in these services, you can get useful information:


These services are almost must have for any webmaster involved in SEO optimization.

Content


The impact of content on SEO success is hard to overestimate. For the best ranking of pages by search engines content should be of high quality and useful for visitors. It would seem that this is an obvious, captain's truth. But still a huge amount of commercial resources in the network contain pages filled with useless or copied from somewhere information. And it hurts, first of all, the assessment of the resource itself by search engines.



Content plan


If we talk about e-commerce sites, the first step is to generate content for:


Help in work


We have already mentioned two services from Google and Yandex that help identify non-unique headers and identify duplicate content. You can also recommend the services http://advego.ru/plagiatus/ and http://www.content-watch.ru/ , allowing you to check the content for uniqueness.

Two more services will help you to check the structure of the site: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ and http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html . They will scan your resource and point out shortcomings in the structure, possible problems, technical issues that need to be corrected that may affect the ranking of your site.

The second level of the pyramid: key queries




Unlike SEO, contextual advertising makes it much more accurate to work with an audience selectively. For SEO-promotion, this level of accuracy is still unattainable. However, we still have access to certain targeting tools, and first of all, key queries.

Key requests are classified by nature:


and by region:



When choosing key requests and distributing them across the pages of the site, you must firmly adhere to three criteria:



Regional ranking


Issued by the search engine page must meet the user's requests. And how do most sites work today? There is a section, subsection, filters, products, and the main site is immediately tailored for specific cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, etc.). But it is quite difficult to promote at once by many regional requests, and sometimes it is not at all possible.

Therefore, in order to segment information on the site as much as possible useful for users and for the search engine, divide the site into regional subdomains. For example, msk.site.ru, spb.site.ru, etc.



When working with key queries, the following services will be useful:


Third Level Pyramid: Link Marketing




The term “link marketing” refers to the activity of optimizing links and quoting your site. That is, it should lead to links from other resources.

If you want to promote your website, it is very important that the reference mass looks as natural as possible and as useful as possible. Many people buy links on link exchanges so that the site can be ranked in the search results. And it seems to be good. The site sells, brings traffic. But representatives of search engines argue that this approach has no future. It is necessary to give and build up useful links.

The reference weight must satisfy the following criteria:


As tools for working with links, we can recommend the following services:


The fourth level of the pyramid: behavioral factors + brand quoting + social signals




These are brand and social factors. Search engines introduce new signals that help determine how the site is relevant to the subject, how well it is qualitative.

Suppose you visited a resource and found an interesting article there. You probably want her to share with anyone. That is, it is useful content for you. This is the first signal.

The second signal is convenience. The user came to your site, found a convenient order form, information about travel and other information. And if your competitors do not have all of this, then the search engine will give preference to your site when forming the issue, because it provides more detailed information, has a convenient interface, and in general this product is made for people.

The third signal is the mention of your brand. Search engines love brands, that is, those sites that are most often linked to. It may not even be links, but some textual references, but Google and Yandex also use them when ranking. Therefore, the more often your site is cited, the higher the likelihood that search engines will love it.

Modern realities


Time easy SEO passed. Now you should not expect any quick results from SEO. This is not a panacea, which will bear fruit tomorrow. If you are promised this, then do not believe these unfortunate SEOs, because instead of the result, you will receive only negative from the search engines.



If we talk about really proper SEO, about forming the right link profile, about shaping the right content strategy, about eliminating technical problems, then this work will begin to bring first results in at least three to four months. This is the first stage, which will give some results. After six months, SEO will start to pay off. And only during the year you will be able to get some significant results, some rather interesting share of traffic, bringing sales, transactions or conversion, depending on what you are tracking and what you do.

Interesting case


Finally, I want to talk about one interesting and illustrative case of SEO-promotion, which took place in my practice. We are talking about the online store of toys planettoys.ua . Initially, the client set a goal: to start work on SEO and increase sales through the site. Absolutely commonplace goal for any selling business. He does not need traffic and positions in search results, he needs sales, leads, some kind of target transitions. SEO experts often do not understand this and are chasing some abstract indicators that result in nothing.

First, the following work was carried out:


Then practical steps were taken:


The first works were carried out in October, which immediately began to affect attendance:





In the end, an increase of 568%. Not bad enough, considering that the graphs reflect only the first stage. Then optimization and expansion of the structure were carried out, an audit was introduced, etc.

Summarizing




So, to form the right SEO promotion strategy you need:

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/277317/

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