Everything you wanted to know about SEO to get started

Briefly about SEO

With SEO, we do everything to make the site user-friendly, understandable, and advantageous for the search engine. All this is done to ensure that the system ranks us higher than our competitors. The algorithms of the system are constantly changing, so it is necessary to always be on guard and track innovations. However, there are three areas that remain relevant for the system: quality content, technical aspects, and external promotion. Thanks to this, we can compete for a top spot, increase the number of quality clients, and thereby multiply profits.

Interesting myths about SEO

Free search. It is commonly believed that SEO is free traffic. While we constantly need to spend a budget on advertising, calculate costs per click, and seek quick results. In general, search traffic is divided into organic and paid. But this does not make “organic” free, as it also requires investment in both material and time resources. Therefore, it would be correct to say: organic results are conditionally free, as you do not pay for each click like in advertising. 

Forecasts and guarantees. This is absolutely incorrect, as due to the constant modifications of the system, making forecasts is almost impossible. There is only a possibility to “guess” how events will develop. 

“Unclear magic.” Dancing with tambourines and SEO amulets to boost search rankings. All this will not help, as promoting a site is a constant, uninterrupted systematic effort. 

Content is king! Indeed, it is very difficult to overestimate the role of content for search optimization. But this does not mean that it will solve everything by itself, especially in competitive niches. 

The more keywords, the better! Currently, systems have become much smarter, as Google can understand what the text is about even if there are no keywords present. At the same time, it punishes for keyword stuffing mercilessly. 

It is worth promoting high-frequency keywords. This sounds logical and seems true, and everyone believes it. In reality, low-frequency keywords are much more valuable and bring significantly more traffic, while the competition for them is low. 

SEO and site structure 

Semantic core – is the foundation of website promotion.  The development of the site should start with collecting keywords. 

Keywords – are a very important component for Google. They can show us and assess the direct demand as such. They also help prioritize for the site. With various tools, we can track how often consumers search for our product. This is a very important stage, as some products consumers may not search for at all, while we will be doing SEO for the site, meaning money down the drain. 

We can use semantics not only to determine demand but also to use keywords on the pages themselves, in the texts. By adding these keywords, we increase the relevance of our site to the system’s queries, while not forgetting about the quality of the content, as it is evaluated not by the system but by the user who is familiarizing themselves with your product.

Once again, let’s repeat where the defined keywords can be used: for texts, articles, and also in headings.

Internal factors:

• domain name;
• site availability and server responses;
• page loading speed;
• URL structure;
• content uniqueness;
• page optimization for specific keywords;
• absence of site duplicates available for indexing;
• usability and design;
• adaptation for mobile devices.

External optimization

Links to your site – are analogous to recommendations, but misuse of them can lead to severe penalties from Google. What this means is links from external donor sites.

Contextual links. Adding a link to an already existing article. They usually remain there forever, but Google is very concerned about the mismatch between the age of the article and the links within it, and this is still not the best option for promotion.

Crowd (link building). Links from forums and Q&A sites. They have quite low weight – they don’t contribute much to the site, but they are the most “safe” and necessary for diversifying the link profile. 

SEO Tips

• “Gray-black” methods work very well, as in some niches you can only advance effectively this way. 
• Meta tags will give you 30% of the result. 
• It may sound strange, but copy from competitors if you lack knowledge. By analyzing how competitors operate, you can develop your own strategy based on their example. 
• Articles in the top may not be written by specialists. Therefore, we do not recommend trusting top-ranking articles 100%. First, check who the author is, how experienced they are, and only after that decide whether to trust the information they provide. 
• You can buy an existing site. To avoid wasting time due to the site landing in the so-called “sandbox,” on developing a site that will only be able to grow and move to the top after some time. 
• Consult with top specialists. This way, you can save time, resources, and learn how to properly perform these or other actions for promotion. 
• Hire specialists in-house and save on contractors. 

To dive deeper into the topic, you have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the presentation in video format with answers to questions.