Where to start SEO promotion? Although there is no one answer for all cases, we say – find the weaknesses of the site and eliminate them. If you are promoting your site with SEO, take a look at these important points. Thus, we will discuss how to optimize your site.

Step 1: Strategy and Semantic Core

It is important to prepare an SEO promotion strategy before the work begins. At this stage, you can significantly reduce future time costs and plan your budget in advance. Many elements of the strategy can be worked on in parallel, but the first and key element of the plan is the selection of the semantic core.

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Semantic core

The semantic core is a set of words and phrases that characterize the information orientation, products or services of the site. The basis for the formation of semantic core is the search queries of users through search engines. Access to these requests is carried out through special statistics collection services, for example, Trends for Google.

In both cases, the selection of phrases for the semantic core begins with the definition of the main information direction. The consistent expansion of the semantic core and the addition of related phrases allow you to cover all aspects and topics that will be covered in the information materials.

The frequency of requests is of great importance. The general logic is as follows: the higher the frequency (the number of impressions per month), the higher the competition for getting into the top with this phrase.

Before promoting the site, you need to analyze competing sites from the top of the issue. They achieved high positions, relying on their own effective strategy. A good solution would be to use it partially or completely in your own project.

Step 2: Content Planning

When the core is composed, it is necessary to move on to content planning. This stage includes the definition of the topics of the articles and the uniform distribution of search (key) phrases over them. Consider the following factors:

• Independent SEO promotion of the site for low-frequency (LF) queries requires less effort, but you should not forget about high-frequency (HF). The best solution would be a combination of HF and LF requests in one material.

• Spam or too many key phrases in one text can lead to negative results. Attempting to use too many occurrences of keys can result in being filtered and excluded from the search.

• It is necessary to pay attention to the distribution of materials by thematic categories. 

Determining the target audience (TA) is an important step in preparing for content creation. The style of writing and presenting the main facts strongly depends on the composition of the target audience. 

Step 3: Create and post content

The result of self-promotion of the site more than half depends on the content. In addition to the semantic load and usefulness for the reader, the texts must meet certain requirements in order for the search engines to consider them of high quality:

• Structured texts are easy to read, search engines rank sites better if they use headings of different levels, lists, tables, and blocks of text.

• The volume of the article should be at least 350 characters, but it is better to focus on 500-700 characters.

• Alt tags are required for images.

• The presence of the Title and Description tags is also mandatory, and the use of keywords in them is desirable.

• The use of blocks, such as “Similar articles (products)”, “Latest articles” (for blogs), as well as the use of internal links to other text materials significantly increases the speed and quality of site indexing by search engines.

Step 4: Optimizing Technical Factors

Self-promotion of the site in search engines involves the optimization of technical factors. Any internal link must open in less than 3 seconds to meet the minimum performance requirements. It is also important to optimize the site template for correct display on mobile devices.

The quality rating is affected by the number of page duplicates: ideally, they should not be. Also, you need to take care of creating an XML sitemap and its HTML version to speed up indexing by search robots. Be sure to add it to the Google Search Console. With its help, you can get useful information about the work of promoted network resources and set up indexing.

Step 5: Optimizing Quality Scores for Search Engines

It is important to pay attention to other indicators of quality. Modern requirements of search engines include the mandatory use of an SSL certificate, which allows you to encrypt traffic and increase the security of the transfer of users’ personal data.

It is also advisable to use specially customized RSS feeds of materials to connect turbo pages. 

The introduction of schema.org markup will improve the presentation of the site in search results and show users more informative snippets. They may include an image for informational articles or a price for online store products.

It is best to start optimizing and promoting commercial sites by placing a link in the Google mapping services. It is also necessary:

• Register a site in Google My Business.

• Set regionality (if necessary).

Behavioral factors

These include a whole group of indicators, the main of which are the amount of time spent on the page and the depth of viewing the site. There are many ways to keep the user on the page:

• video viewing;

• interactive elements: calculators, polls, and any other methods of user interaction that require responses;

• invitations to chats, filling out forms, commenting.

Step 6: Link promotion

An important element of SEO promotion is links to third-party resources. Their presence indicates to search engines that your site is popular with users. Links also allow you to increase the number of transitions to the promoted site. For this reason, they should be as natural as possible, and the article in which they are published should be interesting to users.

The material posted on the referring resource should be devoted to a topic related to your project and contain keywords from your keyword list. Links on foreign sites (donors) have a positive effect on promotion in search only if two conditions are met:

• Donors are not subject to sanctions for violations (viruses, dishonest promotion methods).

• They are a quality resource with their own audience.

Step 7: Use Social Media to Promote Your Site

Link promotion requires a budget, while social networks are a resource with a huge audience where you can publish links for free. For high-quality self-promotion of the site, you need to register the company’s pages in popular social networks and create thematic groups.

Attracting the target audience to groups and increasing the number of visits to the site leads to an increase in quality indicators, which has a positive effect on ranking in the search results. For commercial sites that sell goods or services, social networks are also a great way to attract customers.

Step 8: Advertising

Sometimes webmasters, instead of self-optimization and website promotion, choose contextual advertising as a way to immediately get to the top of search results. The creation and launch of an advertising campaign in Google can become an additional factor in the growth of positions in SERP.

Contextual and banner advertising can provide not only traffic growth but also additional statistics on behavioral factors, which in most cases leads to better rankings.

Step 9: Collecting visitor statistics and analytics

To control the results of independent SEO optimization of the site and its promotion in the search, you need to connect specialized services: for example Google Analytics. With its help, you can collect and analyze data on the dynamics of views and track user behavior on pages.

Reports by the time of day, geographic location of visitors, gender and age categories, and interests will help you understand a lot about the composition of your site’s target audience. 

Statistical data helps to adjust the promotion strategy to achieve the best result.

Step 10: Influence of reputation on-site promotions

The reputation indicator takes into account the opinion of users about the site and its popularity. In the most simplified version, we are talking about reviews that are published on Google Maps, Directory, and My Business services. There are also specialized sites that publish user opinions about a variety of companies.

One of the most important aspects of the successful promotion of the site is the number of direct hits. This indicator tells about the level of popularity (users know and remember your domain), which also contributes to better rankings. An effective way to increase the number of direct hits is to use traditional marketing channels: outdoor advertising, banners, TV, and radio.

Conclusion

Before starting SEO optimization, you need to evaluate the maximum possible number of factors that can affect the result of the promotion. Content and structure optimization will take a lot of time: the first significant results will be visible in 2-3 months. 

If something from our list has not yet been done for your site, then you already have an idea where to start search engine optimization.

By fixing the flaws of the site, you create a stronger foundation for it. And on this basis, you can “build” an effective SEO promotion that will bring success to your company.