In order for the website to grow, develop and make a profit, it should be visited by as many people as possible. One of the best ways to achieve this is to place it as high as possible in the SERPs. Let’s see how this can be achieved, how much time and money will be needed, and what operations are included in basic seo

What is SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the abbreviation can be literally deciphered as “search engine optimization”. The word engines in the term is used to refer to artificial intelligence that monitors compliance with algorithms. This definition includes any basic and additional actions aimed at ensuring that the website appears higher in the search results. Moreover, such measures can be applied both for new pages, so that they immediately fall into the TOP of, the issue, and for existing material in order to increase its position.

Note! Do not confuse the abbreviations SEO and CEO. The second has a completely different meaning – this is the abbreviated name of the position of the general director of the company.
To understand what SEO is, let’s look at the basic operations that are carried out as part of the promotion:

1. Preliminary SEO training and tracking changes in the policies and features of search engines, identifying important factors and understanding algorithms.
2. Analysis of competitors in the issuance of keywords. It’s important to track overall demand – the frequency of search queries and the traffic coming from those pages.
3. Collection and clustering of the semantic core (it is a ready-made list of requests, separated by pro pages that you plan to promote).
4. Internal optimization of the resource, all technical work to improve and accelerate it.
5. External optimization – elaboration of the link mass of the website. This is the addition of mentions of the promoted resource and individual quotes from it on the network, which will necessarily lead to putting a link to your website on a third-party resource.
6. Analysis of user behavior. Analysis of the actions that the user performs when visiting the page and the website as a whole. After this point, changes in the structure and appearance of the website are possible, which worsen the user experience
7. Monitoring of website positions. Tracking changes in the position of the page in the issue and constantly adjusting the course to achieve maximum efficiency.
   

You can start checking websites or competitors and understand whether the functionality and interface of the service are suitable for you right now in the SEOGUN service

In order to make the right decisions and effectively promote the website, the main thing is to understand the basic algorithms of search engines. It depends on them on which search bar your resource will be displayed. To deeply dive into this topic, it will not be superfluous to study the very history of the emergence and development of modern search engines

Pros and cons of SEO as a type of digital advertising

SEO promotion is a free way to put your website at the top of the SERPs. This means that people who are already interested in the topic or product will first of all see the promoted portal. Since the interest has already been formed, you do not need to spend additional time on the disclosure of pain and advertising your service.

But what’s really important is to get a really high position. The keywords of most users are solved with the help of the first three links offered by the search engine, so most people will not go further. And less than 1% of interested people go to the second page of the search engine.

Therefore SEO is important to set up so well that the website falls into the TOP-10 of the first search engine results. And the more popular the niche in which you are developing, the closer to the beginning of the issue it is worth summing up your portal. But, if this type of optimization and promotion was properly configured once, it can bear fruit for many years without requiring additional costs.

To summarize – SEO is a long-term project that helps to promote a website on organic traffic. It does not require advertising costs, does not become obsolete over time, but also does not work in a couple of days. Optimization, preparation and promotion of the website, most likely, will take a long time, especially if the owner did not even think about the basic algorithms of search engines when he first started creating a resource.

Despite the lack of advertising costs, sometimes SEO promotion can require not only a lot of time, but also a lot of money. They will leave not to pay for the ad, but to improve and basically optimize the website itself and its environment. However the level of costs depends on the initial state of the portal

Pros of SEO:

• long-term validity
• organic traffic, no investment in advertising

Cons:

• results come only after a while
• it is not always possible to accurately predict the result using only white tools
• the cost of promoting high-frequency keywords can be large both for developing content and for acquiring links

Differences between SEO and PPC

It will be easy for an inexperienced user to confuse the first places in the issue with advertising spaces. Contextual advertising in the search engines Yandex and Google is located at the very top of the search page. In addition, search engines often give preference to the websites of their ecosystem.

Despite the fact that advertisements are always higher, practice shows that they cause less trust among users. Most people are already accustomed to the presence of advertising and automatically skip such offers. Organic results of issuance are perceived by users more naturally and cause more confidence as quality resources. But at the same time, sometimes it is almost impossible to achieve the top, since search engines often give advantages to the websites of their ecosystem.

However, there are two more basic differences between SEO promotion and contextual advertising – this is the level of costs and the speed of obtaining a result. Let’s dwell on them in more detail.

The cost of attracting traffic

SEO is considered a less resource-intensive way to attract targeted users. With constant investment in PPC and ignoring SEO, the website may not grow in organic positions, while in the opposite situation, organic positions will definitely grow and begin to bring traffic, but the speed of obtaining such traffic will not be fast and the effect will increase gradually. In such a situation, with a sharp decrease or lack of a budget for advertising, the result with investments in SEO will still lead users. The price of contextual advertising, regardless of the circumstances, will be several times higher than the cost of SEO.

Timing of results

In PPC the results will not be long in coming, it is only necessary to replenish the balance of the ads platform and make selling creative images. It is impossible to name a universal period in which SEO is guaranteed to give a result. Sometimes the process takes 3 weeks, and sometimes it can take more than a year. The speed of the website in the issue after SEO optimization is affected by several basic factors:

• The chosen topic and the level of competition existing in it.
• The term of the website – according to it, search engines understand how much the resource can be trusted.
• Current level of traffic on the website – based on this data, the algorithm determines how useful page is.
• The number of links and quotes to the website from external sources as an indicator of authority.
• The number of topics on the website that are similar to the user’s request.

At the same time, not always a large budget gives a greater speed of development. The main thing for fast and high-quality SEO promotion is to constantly monitor changes, thoughtfully analyze them and change the strategy, depending on the conclusions drawn. It is most convenient to do this with the help of special services, such as SEOGUN.

Basic SEO-optimization of a website

A complete strategy for optimizing and promoting a particular website is usually created by a specialist, based on the current state and subject of the resource. However, there are basic SEO things that any website owner or aspiring SEO optimizer can do to substantially elevate a page in the SERPs. First of all, it is important to do some work to prepare and study the situation.

Preparation and planning

To properly carry out work on basic SEO optimization and promotion, you need to competently approach its planning. The main thing at this stage is to collect as much information as possible. First of all, it is worth finding the websites of competitors and partners, as well as those resources that link to them.

If links can still be left for later stages, then websites of related topics will have to be analyzed carefully. It is important to pay attention to all the promotion methods that the owners of more successful websites use – keywords are especially important at this stage. The main task of the stage is to get a collective “portrait” of the website of its subject, which in the search results is in the most attractive place.

Keyword Research

To make a semantic core, you need to understand which keywords and expressions should be targeted. You can get them from three sources:

• Formation of a list of popular keywords based on Google data using Google Trends. These systems will show you the most popular themes, by your main keys.
• A list of competitor keys. Analyzing other websites on their subject, you can make a list of keys used. It can also come in handy at this stage.
• Selection of search tips

However, deciding on the keywords is only half the battle. Next, you need to correctly cluster them in order to distribute them into pages, for which you then need to create competent content. It is important that search network algorithms recognize these phrases and expressions, and people, at the same time, do not stumble over them while reading the text.

For SEO’s is necessary to take into account some other points – for example, in order for the promotion of the keywords to be effective, it is important that the competition for it is not too great. It also matters how clearly the query is formulated, and how much it corresponds to what exactly the network users want to find. A low-frequency keyword promotion strategy is often one of the most successful with high competition in a niche.

Internal SEO optimization

The process of working on basic internal optimization is the maximum improvement of the website itself. This applies not only to the presented content, but also to the technical component – the download speed, the availability of convenient versions for different devices, etc.
Basic internal SEO optimization may include the following works:

• Create new content and optimize old content. When choosing topics for articles, it is important to start from the keywords and expressions selected in the previous step. Also, when creating each article, you need to rely on the rules of basic SEO.
• Filling in meta tags. In order for the website to be promoted by search engines, it is important to correctly fill in the Title, Description and h1-h6 fields. They pay attention not only to search robots, but also to users who care about the relevance of texts and getting into their search intent. If the page uses images, alt attributes must also be specified for them.
• Development of a linking system. Under this name there are only links in one article of the website to another, or other articles from the same resource. For example, if in the main article you touch on a topic in passing, you can immediately leave a link to the material that reveals the issue in more detail.
• Cleaning. Before starting basic SEO optimization it is important to check that the website does not have old links that no longer work, and articles that completely duplicate each other. Such trifles can significantly reduce the effectiveness of promotion.
• Adaptability of the website. Optimization of the website for different devices. In modern realities, only one computer version is not enough – if the page opens crookedly on the phone, you lose a large percentage of users who access the Internet only from mobile devices.
• Increase the speed of work. Now people are not used to waiting long for the website to load. If the page does not open immediately, most users leave it and go looking further.
• Set up redirects. This step is important only if the resource address has recently changed.
• Creation of special files in which information about your website is given in the language of search engines. It sounds intimidating, but there really aren’t that many. This is the creation of a sitemap, the creation of robots.txt, the study of structured data.

In other words, for high-quality basic internal optimization it is important that everything is established. The website should be not only user-friendly, but also adapted to the requirements of algorithms.

External optimization

It is worth moving to this step only after all the internal basic SEO optimization work is over. When you are completely sure that the website is ready for promotion, you can start thinking about link promotion. First of all, it is important to conduct an audit of the links already put on the Internet .

To do this, it is important to find all the links to the website, analyze them and understand how effective they are. Then you can start creating new ones. Previously, it was decided to solve this issue by purchasing links on special exchanges – the more and cheaper, the better. However, now the method is somewhat outdated. In a recent statement John Mueller (SEO specialist at Google) stated that links are still important, but now the quality of the link prevails over quality.

Additional promotion

The methods listed above are only the basic points of SEO optimization. In many cases, these small steps may not be enough to promote the website even in the TOP-10. In this case, a deeper analysis and the use of additional tools will be required.

There are many of them in SEO. But, first, let’s go through the most interesting and effective SEO optimization options that are available to everyone.

Behavioral factors

There are two basic aspects of user behavior that affect the position of the website in the issue. The first is the behavior directly on the search page. At this point, the user has not yet come to your website and only a snippet is available to him – a small description of the page, which consists only of a title and a brief description.

For a snippet, as well as for an ad in PPC, the basic concept of CTR is used – the ratio of the number of users who saw the description with the number of those who clicked on it. The lower this indicator, the more the link in the issue will fall. We conclude that the snippet should convince the user that the page has an accurate answer to his/her question, then over time the website will become more and more successful.

It is also important for basic SEO and advanced SEO optimization and user behavior on the website itself. Here the algorithms take into account many parameters, but it is worth paying attention, first of all, to the basic ones:

• How long the person did not leave the website.
• How many users opened the page and immediately closed it.
• Whether the visitor went to other pages of the website (if yes – this is a big plus).
• Whether a person has shown interest in the interactive elements of the page – videos, forms, buttons, etc. are considered.
• Whether the user has visited other websites on the same domain.
• How the visitor behaved after visiting the page. The ideal option is if a person left the website and closed the browser, or search page. But if the user returned to the search and began to look through other links – this is a bad indicator, the search engine will conclude that there was no answer on your website.

It turns out that the work on optimizing behavioral factors should be comprehensive. It is not enough just to create an attractive snippet – it is important to make the page itself so that the user wants to stay as long as possible and interact with individual elements.

Local SEO

Local SEO (promotion of websites by region) is not suitable for every business and not for any website, but for some businesses this direction should become central. It is easy to decide – if the information on the website is relevant only for a certain area or the business works only in a specific region, it is worth paying attention to this direction. The difference between local SEO optimization is that the promotion covers only a certain zone, and not the whole country or even the world.

External links

This aspect has already been touched upon in the paragraph about basic linking, but links for search engines are of great importance, so it is worth mentioning their optimization separately. It is important to understand that it is not only the very presence of the link and which page it directs the user to that matters, but the anchor.

Anchor is the text behind which the link is hidden. It is important that it clearly makes it clear to both users and algorithms what will be discussed. However, do not overdo it with keywords in anchors – search engines are suspicious of such behavior and can because of this pessimize the website in the issue.

Black and white hat SEO

Search engine algorithms are able to divide SEO optimization methods into “white” and “black”, and the latter usually do not bring anything good to the website. The basic “white” schemes include all actions to improve the website, increase comfort from its use and native advertising. In other words, anything that is not noticeable to the average user is allowed and even encouraged.

The “black” schemes of SEO optimization include dishonest and fraudulent options for page promotion – for example, hacking large portals and trying to pour traffic, or creating fake websites for placing links. Previously, such methods were effective, but search engines quickly reacted and created their own methods to combat dishonest promotion. Today, such methods can rather worsen the position of the website than promote it.

There are, in addition, “gray” methods that are not prohibited, but should be used with caution. For the most part, this category includes basic keyword manipulation – they still work well, so SEOs are in no hurry to abandon them. But it is better to trust such actions only to real professionals, since you can run into the website falling under search filters.

Conclusion

SEO is a powerful and profitable promotion tool that has remained relevant for many years. You can bet only on it, and you can connect other sources of traffic, but you can not completely forget about optimization otherwise there is a risk of missing a very large and completely free flow of users.

The main thing is to carefully study the basic SEO algorithms of search engines in order to make a competent promotion strategy and constantly keep your finger on the pulse. And to do this without unnecessary stress, you can use special services that will help not only to track changes in the position of the website, but also to collect additional useful information. Study, experiment and very soon you will be able to personally evaluate all the advantages of SEO promotion.