Website promotion from scratch: basic steps
A useful longread with which you can independently optimize the site at no cost or with minimal costs.
So, the goal is to promote the site. To achieve it, a specific strategy with real numbers is needed. To promote the desired site, whether it is an online store or services, a government site or a blog, it is important to know the desired result. It may change in the course of work, as special analyzes of competitors, target audience and your capabilities will be carried out.
In this article you will find answers to the following questions about promotion in Google and Yandex:
- What are the basic principles of effective SEO?
- How to quickly promote your site in search engines?
- What is internal optimization and the necessary tools for promotion?
- How does website promotion from scratch go in parallel with external optimization?
- Behavioral factors of visitors to the site.
- Commercial factors for efficient operation.
Basic Principles of Effective SEO
Track and control! Website promotion from scratch cannot do without controlling search positions, tracking where users come to our site from, as well as what words and phrases they use.
Ideally, you should start optimizing your site even before the site is created. This will help to create a site structure that will increase your search engine rankings.
The following points need to be considered:
- The uniqueness of the texts (above 95%).
- Linking (internal links between pages).
- Domain.
- Readable page addresses (human-readable URL).
- Server response codes.
In addition to unique texts, the pages themselves should not be repeated or have identical content, since Yandex or Google will consider that you have duplicated content.
Internal optimization
Website promotion from scratch, of course, begins with internal settings. Tools such as articles, meta tags, and content in general should be updated regularly. This is good for the reputation of the web resource. Also, internal optimization prepares the site for direct promotion in the future. All steps must be carried out with high quality so that you do not have to redo and spend extra time.
Keywords
The buyer must find what he was looking for! And we will help him. The title (title), article, URL and captions for pictures should contain keywords on a specific topic. By the way, it is important to divide the pages into products, categories and groups, for each of them their own groups of words are selected. Keywords are arranged in a hierarchical order by frequency.
Adding a Sitemap
A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to find the right page. Google Sitemap will improve the completeness of indexing.
Site url structure and human-readable URL
The structure of sections and pages should be such that important pages have the appropriate depth of transitions. By principle, the more important, the closer to the main page, according to the search engine.
A human-readable URL not only makes it easier for users to find the page, but is also more favorable for search robots.
Optimizing meta tags and ALTs is an important part of optimization that is not difficult to do on your own. All tags must include keywords.
Title is an important SEO element, the title displayed when a page is searched.
Description – description under Title. Small text describing the topic of the page.
ALT tag – photo description. Allows robots to find your photo as they only read text.
Content
When writing articles, keywords must be taken into account. It should be interesting to the reader and updated regularly.
External optimization for site promotion by yourself
Having prepared the site for visitors and having worked out the keywords, it is necessary to establish channels to attract traffic. In order to understand the types of traffic and where visitors come from, the main resources and features will be detailed below.
External links are divided into:
- permanent, or “eternal” (one-time payment, the link remains for a long period or forever);
- temporary, or dynamic (payment occurs constantly, for each day or month the link is found on the donor site).
Natural traffic
Free promotion from scratch provides the most optimal source of traffic, where visitors come through a search engine. Natural traffic increases the credibility of the resource. With constant SEO promotion, the conversion to buyers or regular users is the highest. Of course, organic publishing takes time and resources, but as a result, regular targeted visitors and conversions.
Paid traffic – visitors, for the attraction of which, a fee is charged. Popular among young sites to attract an audience faster.
Examples of paid sources:
- contextual advertising;
- banner advertising;
- teaser advertising;
- media advertising;
- video advertising;
- paid advertising in social networks, etc.
Tools for proper free promotion
External linking
As in life, relationships with people, so on the Internet, relationships with other sites are very important. By developing them, you can send more traffic to your web resource. By personally agreeing with webmasters to place a link to yours on their site. You can also contact the media or journalists and say that You are ready to act as an expert in your topic.
BUT! First you need to make sure that the partner has a good web reputation, in no case lower than yours.
Catalogs
They remain the basic tool for link building. Placement in directories will be especially useful if you choose thematic resources. This will be appreciated by search engines and will attract the target audience. The second highlight of this method is the description of the site with individual text for each directory. Nobody likes spam, right? For naturalness and weight gain, it is worth doing everything manually.
Google My Business (Google Business Profile)
The free service Google My Business (Google Business Profile) allows you to see your site in the local Google search results.
- The information must be correct and up-to-date (company name, address, telephone).
- Post high-quality and informative photos.
- Regular posts will help inform visitors about your products and new products in more detail.
- To communicate with customers, there is a messenger function that can be connected.
- Enter the basic data about the company, about the specialization of the business. Make sure that the information is fully consistent with the services and products of your company.
- It is possible to see the number of clicks to your site through the statistics of the service.
Promotion on social networks
On thematic forums, groups in social networks and information portals, you can post posts with a further link to an article from your site. If the project is a beginner, then in order to raise it to the top, you need to create a group of the company and promote it. In parallel, interacting with the audience, make it interesting for users to go to the main source – your site.
Features of paid promotion
Link building should be done gradually and evenly. If the site is new or it has zero link mass, you cannot buy 100 links to the resource at once. The search robot negatively perceives such unnatural growth and sanctions are possible.
In order to select quality donors and invest with efficiency, you should pay attention to the following selection guidelines:
- compliance with the subject (ideally – the same subject + region);
- website traffic: the more, the better;
- a small number of outgoing links;
- live site with updated content;
- presence in news aggregators and catalogs;
- The site does not participate in dynamic link exchanges.
Google Ads
A system for placing contextual advertising on Google pages. Of the obvious advantages, it is the ability to independently choose where to show your advertising campaign, see the effectiveness and indicate the budget that you decide to spend.
Website promotion in social networks
A very popular method of website promotion lately. Special groups are created, thousands of users are invited, the news feed is regularly updated with links to the main site.
Behavioral factors of visitors on the site
In the past few years, the behavioral factors of the site have taken one of the most important places in the promotion of the site and its evaluation by search engines. With the help of their analysis, the places that should be worked on within the site itself are determined.
Behavioral factors include:
- The attendance of a resource as a whole indicates its popularity in search engines.
- CTR and dwell time.
- The time spent on the site is an indicator of the quality of the site. If the user stays for a short time, then the site is not good enough.
- Browsing depth is the number of pages viewed per visit.
- bounce rate.
- Return rate. If users return to the pages of the site, then they find something useful there.
- Direct referrals and referrals from social networking pages can also be a sign of the resource’s usefulness.
How to improve behavioral factors?
- Optimization of the mobile version of the site. Everything is very simple: the site should be easy to use.
- Attractive snippet. The response to the user’s request should attract attention. To attract attention, you can use many tools: micro-markup, emoji, photo, video preview and of course Description.
- Fast website loading time. Not only do people like fast websites, but so do search engines. By using caching, reducing the size of JavaScript and CSS, compressing images for the site, and adjusting the load order of page elements, you can achieve faster loading times. Most CMSs have tools to make all these adjustments.
- Unnecessary requests. Often this applies to high-frequency queries. For example, a site with wooden tables is promoted by the query “tables”, and the tables are plastic, metal, glass. From this it follows that users who are not looking for “wooden tables” will bring a lot of failures.
Commercial factors
Trust or not trust? What does a modern user need to trust a company/website? Commercial factors – a set of characteristics necessary for a potential client to decide to trust the company and perform a targeted action (call order, purchase).
| Factor type | Description |
| Interactive elements | A good example would be: usability, shorter text, online chats. |
| Bulleted Lists | One of the elements of structuring texts, especially long ones. |
| Internal links | Useful content that can be clicked to within your site. |
| Does not affect the growth of positions |
|
| Contact Information |
|
| Information about the company |
|
| Description of goods and services |
|
Summarizing
For high-quality website promotion, gradualness is important, as much as possible to do everything manually and of course with high quality. The simple truth is that if a user likes a site, the search engine will certainly like it. SEO promotion should be complex, that is, optimize several areas in parallel. And then analyze them in order to understand where else it is necessary to improve.
Internet marketing expert. Head of marketing agency MAVR.
Business degree “Master of Business Administration” (MBA).