Digital Marketing, SEO

Creating a website is only half the battle. Or even a quarter of it. What’s more important is attracting customers to it, promoting the resource in search engines. Transforming the website into a marketing tool that works for your business.

Unfortunately, doing this is not so simple and can be expensive. There is also a high likelihood of encountering blatant fraud from those who call themselves SEO specialists, i.e., professionals in search engine optimization. Perhaps, for some, the only real choice is to handle the promotion of their resource independently. Others may opt for services, but it’s crucial for them to understand how it’s actually done. Read and learn, as this introductory article is for you to delve into the profession and the art of website promotion in search engines!

Table of Contents

SEM can be a scam
Which sites can be promoted in search
Which sites are easier to promote in search
How sites are promoted
The process of creating quality content for a website
The process of creating quality content for the website
Writing texts
What texts for SEO should be like
How often the website should be updated
What else is needed for search
System solution

SEO can be a scam

Search engine marketing or SEM, website SEO promotion can be often a deception and scamming of clients. In most cases, it is fraudulent activity offered by unscrupulous companies. Typically, naive entrepreneurs enter into contracts with them, under which the contractor undertakes to perform some kind of miracle – to promote the project to the top of search results for key words.

The main methods of deception are as follows. Firstly, it is indeed not difficult to get into the top search engine results – for unpopular, unnecessary queries. Those for which the site will appear in the search, but customers will not come. Or the client will receive empty, useless traffic.

Secondly, what happens more often, so-called SEO specialists promise results within three months, then achieve nothing and leave, having received payment for all that time.

It is quite possible that not all such companies are blatant scammers. Many of their leaders and even the specialists themselves believe that they can do something. But let’s be realistic. Can anyone from small firms or private specialists compete in skills with the world’s best programmers – the brilliant minds at Google, whose main task is to prevent bad sites from reaching the top of search results?

Most “SEO” companies do anything but the main thing – they do not improve the websites themselves, do not fill them with content. They usually spend no more than a third of the budget on writing texts, saving to the maximum on content quality, attracting schoolchildren or scraping materials from web dumps – from archives of deleted sites.

Unfortunately, quality is never cheap. Especially if the money allocated for website development is spent on maintaining oneself and one’s SEO company. Therefore, in most cases, SEO promotion clients are left with nothing after several months – no traffic, no improvements on the site.

Is there a way out of this situation? Yes, there is, and it lies in the targeted development of the resource, in filling it with relevant high-quality content. Not for nothing do professionals say: content is the king of SEO promotion. And later, we will explain what needs to be done, either independently or with our involvement as professionals.

Which sites can be promoted in search

Let’s start with the bad news. And if someone has already gone down this path, most likely, they have already wasted their money, and there is no prospect of promoting their project in search engines. Even if someone attempts to do so, it is one hundred percent deception and fraud. In reality, in the absolute majority of cases, nothing can be done, and the website needs to be created anew.

Not suitable for search engine optimization:

1. Websites created on website builders. We ask you to send us at least one link to a website created on a paid or free website builder that has managed to rank high in search engine results for somewhat valuable queries.

Today, there are numerous offers of website builders for creating websites without special knowledge. These include Tilda, Wix, and so on, ad infinitum; one can name a dozen or three of the most popular options.

Such projects are template solutions that cannot be made unique, truly interesting, and of sufficient quality to advance in search. Unfortunately, those who fell for the advertising and chose this path to create their website will either have to redo everything or settle for paid advertising for promotion, meaning paying a coin for every click on their link. The miser pays not just twice, but daily and constantly.

2. Websites or pages that are not their own resource but have been and remain provided by a service to the user. These include stores like Shopify, as well as marketplaces like Wildberries, Ozon, and so on. Let’s not argue; within these systems, there are internal promotion methods, and in some cases, even at the level of shamanism.

But in this article, we are talking about external search engine optimization, such as Google Search. And from this point of view, developing a resource on someone else’s site is a completely useless waste of money. It’s like making major repairs in a rented apartment at your own expense. Moreover, with such an agreement that allows the landlord to evict the tenant at any time.

3. Custom-made websites, i.e., those built on custom engines by individual programmers or entire web studios. We are not talking about all resources created in this way. Unfortunately, a significant percentage of such works are absolutely unfriendly to search engines. They require serious preparation involving programmers, not marketers.

And some websites end up practically unsuitable for such promotion. This depends, in part, on the programming language used by developers as the main one. Not everything that looks good at first glance is as good for search engines as it is for our eyes. Unfortunately, there are pages that Google hardly sees at all. But the website developer is unlikely to inform the client about this in advance. We understand that in this world, many decisions are made based on today’s money, not future consequences.

In general, if a website is made entirely independently, without using adequate content management systems, it needs to be dealt with separately and explored individually. You can send us a link, and we will express our opinion on the promotion of your specific resource, which will require specific preparation and roughly estimate the cost.

Which sites are easier to promote in search

Easier, simpler, and cheaper to promote are websites created on the most popular content management systems. Such projects usually represent an intermediate option, a golden mean between development without any code from the user and a completely custom engine.

For instance, if around 70 percent of websites in the world are built on WordPress, it becomes the search engine’s task to correctly index such resources. Unlike entirely self-written code, which developers need to present to Google themselves, and it becomes their problem of how to reach it.

Quality content management systems have corresponding plugins that help add necessary fields to the text to facilitate its indexing. Often, they even help track results and check how well the content aligns with the search query for which the page is being promoted.

For example, in WordPress, the two most popular plugins for this purpose are SEO Yoast and All-in-One SEO, each offering a choice to the user. Yes, both of these plugins require configuration, which can be done either independently by investing time and understanding the matter or by entrusting it to professionals.

However, performing such work is orders of magnitude easier, faster, and cheaper than writing the necessary functionality for a custom engine. That’s why many experts will tell you that for aesthetics, you can do anything. But if the site is needed as a marketing tool for business, it’s better to create it on a popular content management system. Perhaps not all the client’s desires can be realized, but the final financial result will be much higher.

How sites are promoted

But all the technical aspects, in reality, are important but secondary. In fact, as we have already mentioned, the king of promotion is content. The content of the site. That is, primarily, the texts that should be suitable for search and at the same time be interesting and useful for the resource’s visitors.

This is called content marketing, promotion through the content of the resource. Why does it work? Precisely because search engines index keywords and phrases on websites that potential visitors enter in the search.

But it’s not that simple. Historically, it was once enough to simply place as many search phrases as possible on the page. But those times have passed; it worked twenty years ago. Then, due to endless manipulations, search engines became more discerning. So now it is necessary to fill websites with genuinely useful content, of course, complying with certain search requirements that facilitate indexing.

The process of creating quality content for a website

To promote a website, you need not just any content, but specifically content that potential visitors are searching for through search engines. To achieve this, you first need to gather key phrases that people might use to come to your website.

How can you do that? There are several ways. Let’s start with the simplest and most straightforward ones. Advertising services that offer ads around search queries typically provide search statistics on selected keywords for their clients. Often, these data include figures relevant to us: how many times the phrase is searched by search engine visitors.

The second option is to take inspiration from competitors. To do this, visit the relevant site, right-click, and choose something like “View code,” depending on your browser. Then in all this code, or rather, the markup for the browser, find the Title, Description sections. And if you’re lucky, also Keywords, but this field is used less and less, as it is believed that search engines have stopped considering it. Extract what you need from there.

The third option, much more productive, is to use specialized services that allow you to gather the most suitable keywords for your website. For example, Semrush, Semstat, and others.

And finally, the fourth option, which we have been using for many years ourselves, is the specialized program Key Collector. It allows you not only to collect keywords but also to assess the frequency of queries, sort them, divide search phrases according to necessary criteria, and evaluate competition for each.

In practice, usually, as a result of the initial collection, we end up with a list of several thousand words. From this list, we first remove what is clearly unsuitable or uninteresting from the perspective of promotion.

Then all the remaining keywords are divided into three conditional categories: low-frequency, medium-frequency, and high-frequency queries. Of course, specific criteria depend on the topic, but roughly speaking, those requested fewer than 50-100 times a month are low-frequency, followed by medium-frequency, and high-frequency are 1000 and more.

The foundation of promotion is a gradual escalation. We start by filling the site with content that answers low-frequency queries. Because the competition for them is significantly lower, and the chance to reach the top emerges almost from the beginning, as soon as the resource is indexed.

Then, when the initial words have secured the desired positions in the search, we move on to medium-frequency queries and create content for them. When we succeed in this as well, we proceed to the next stage. That is, articles that address more frequent user queries.

At the same time, pay attention to two points. Firstly, it sometimes happens that, for some reason, a more frequent query still has lower competition than a less frequent one. Typically, specialized programs are needed to find such keywords. And content should be created for them as a top priority.

But in the worst case, on an intuitive level, you can determine competition for the chosen phrase just by looking at it. To do this, enter the phrase into the search and look at the results, skipping paid contextual advertising, of course. Are there sites beyond that whose homepage corresponds to the key query? And not just one? That’s a bad sign.

Does Wikipedia take up a position, and some service or product aggregator in the same industry takes another? Plus, two marketplaces? Is there a chance to break through and be in this list? If not, then perhaps it’s not worth creating content for it; better to choose something with more opportunities. At least, for now, at the beginning of the promotion process.

As a result of this analysis, we are left with a list of key phrases – the themes for which we plan to promote. These are the topics for writing articles.

Writing Texts

Of course, you can find various things on the Internet, but let’s assume that our clients are generally reasonable people who can distinguish good from bad. Therefore, it is not worth presenting them with blatant forgery as text. They won’t appreciate it. Potential sources of inappropriate materials for a website may include:

• Content exchange platforms where they pay pennies, and tasks are often carried out by schoolchildren.
• Articles written using artificial intelligence without the touch of a living person. The higher intelligence can do many things, but unfortunately, not at a professional level.
• Stolen or sourced materials from elsewhere. It’s important to remind about respecting copyright, but beyond that, always remember: search engines easily distinguish original texts from copied ones. They never promote secondary resources. Moreover, using article duplicates often leads to the opposite effect – a decrease in the site’s ranking in search results.

There are only two ways to obtain correct and high-quality content: either write it yourself if the website owner is an expert and has the time for it, or hire a professional. In the latter case, the text will still need to be checked and proofread, possibly with the help of an editor.

What SEO Texts Should Be Like

Texts must be of high quality and written by a human for a human. That’s the main thing. The rest is secondary, but also important. Let’s pay attention to these points.

First of all, we can enter a search and see which pages are ranking at the top for a particular query. Most likely, we’ll notice that longer texts, so-called longreads, with internal navigation, tend to rank higher.

One can assume that these internal links, when clicked, signal to the search engine that users are interacting with the site, adding value to it. Or for some other reason. But in any case, today it’s a fact that to appear in search results, writing lengthy content is necessary.

Yes, it has become a joke that when someone, for example, wants to know how long to cook buckwheat, they first have to read the entire history of growing this product. Maybe search engines will change and learn to provide exactly what we need. But for now, this is the reality. To rank, you need such materials.

The second point. There are no rules, and it is pointless, in our opinion, to determine the exact number of so-called occurrences, i.e., the frequency of using keywords and their synonyms in the text. Nevertheless, let’s say that the key phrase should appear a reasonable number of times in the material. Also, it must appear in the title (Title) as close to the beginning as possible, in the description (Description), in H1 tags, which may differ from the Title, and also once or several times in H2 subtitles, and so on.

But there’s no need for excess. Today, search engines have become smart enough to distinguish the genuinely necessary mentions from intrusive repetition.

And users should always be sure that the text is written specifically for them, not for search optimization. In this regard, forgery is often noticeable, and people dislike it intensely. They will quickly leave the site, which, in turn, negatively affects search rankings. Our task, as they say, is to catch and retain, ultimately turning a visitor into a client, into a buyer of what we offer.

How Often Should You Update Your Site

Our experience shows that the more often a site is updated, the more chances it has to break through in search. And indeed, the larger the target, the easier it is to hit it, right? But in reality, of course, filling a site with content is not a cheap process, so it is necessary to operate on the principle of reasonable sufficiency.

Most importantly, do not prepare a bunch of materials and publish them all at once. The best approach is to publish something every day or at least several times a week. Or at least once every few days, for example, one or two new materials per week. Plus something else, a new product position, and so on.

Another way to update the site more frequently is to allow comments at least in some sections. And this is quite important because, in addition to additions to the text, any user activity is essential for promotion. Each action is a plus for the resource, a signal to search engines that the site is valuable and needs to be shown in search results more and more.

What Else Is Needed for Search

Content, content, and content again. Quality content that answers user queries is the only and most crucial factor that promotes a website. However, in addition to this, some details add additional value to your web presence for search engine algorithms.

Firstly, all special fields must be filled in. Specifically, the title and description of the page, Title and Description, inform the search engine about the content of that page. We usually fill in the seemingly outdated Keywords field as well. Not because Google necessarily considers it, but rather as a self-discipline hint for the future, indicating which query we are promoting for a particular page.

Secondly, the behavioral factor, an indicator that is gaining more and more influence on search results. Search engines today practically see everyone who enters and exits. As a result, it’s clear that a site where a visitor lingered for just three seconds will lose its positions. This is precisely why deceiving search engines is futile. Visitors will quickly abandon a site if it doesn’t meet their expectations.

On the contrary, visitors should be engaged through various means. For example, offering them convenient internal links to other useful pages, a calculator to estimate the cost of a service, a feedback form, the opportunity to leave a comment (with pre-moderation, of course), and so on. Anything that sparks imagination.

The third point is those external links to your pages. Google still uses them to evaluate the quality of a resource, but there are many pitfalls. Not all links are useful. Only high-quality links are needed.

Here’s a real case from our experience. It was a few years ago, and the task was to promote an informational portal on investment topics in search results. We, like everyone else at the time, were into links and realized at some point that buying them didn’t bring any significant results. Then everything changed in a moment when we got a friendly link from a serious and well-known online magazine. The author of an article published in the media simply referenced our promoted resource in his article on the topic.

And miraculously, it turns out, links do work. The page suddenly reached the top for a highly competitive query, surpassing sites that were objectively much better, stronger, and older than us by many years!

Yes, links are still necessary, and visitors, in general, are needed— from anywhere, including through advertising and social networks. But with one caveat. It must be a target audience. People who will stay on the site, not leave within seconds. And for this, once again, quality content capable of attracting and retaining an audience is required.

What else is needed for search

Content, Content, and Content Again. Quality content that addresses user queries is the sole and primary factor that promotes a website. However, in addition to this, certain details add extra value to your web presence for search engine algorithms.

Firstly, all special fields must be filled. Specifically, the title and description of the page, Title and Description, provide clues to the search engine about the content of that page. We usually fill in the seemingly outdated Keywords field, not because Google necessarily considers it, but as a self-discipline hint for the future, indicating which query we are promoting for a particular page.

Secondly, the behavioral factor, an indicator that is gaining more influence on search results. Search engines today practically see everyone who enters and exits. As a result, it’s clear that a site where a visitor lingered for just three seconds will lose its positions. This is precisely why deceiving search engines is futile. Visitors will quickly abandon a site if it doesn’t meet their expectations.

On the contrary, visitors should be engaged through various means. For example, offering them convenient internal links to other useful pages, a calculator to estimate the cost of a service, a feedback form, the opportunity to leave a comment (with pre-moderation, of course), and so on. Anything that sparks imagination.

The third point is those external links to your pages. Google still uses them to evaluate the quality of a resource, but there are many pitfalls. Not all links are useful. Only high-quality links are needed.

Here’s a real case from our experience. It was a few years ago, and the task was to promote an informational portal on investment topics in search results. We, like everyone else at the time, were into links and realized at some point that buying them didn’t bring any significant results. Then everything changed in a moment when we got a friendly link from a serious and well-known online magazine. The author of an article published in the media simply referenced our promoted resource in his article on the topic.

And miraculously, it turns out, links do work. The page suddenly reached the top for a highly competitive query, surpassing sites that were objectively much better, stronger, and older than us by many years!

Yes, links are still necessary, and visitors, in general, are needed— from anywhere, including through advertising and social networks. But with one caveat. It must be a target audience. People who will stay on the site, not leave within seconds. And for this, once again, quality content capable of attracting and retaining an audience is required.

System Solution

Now, let’s summarize some key points from this extensive article that touched on the main topics of search engine optimization—briefly, in general terms, defining directions on where and how to proceed.

Firstly, trusting “SEO gurus” is not advisable. Most of them are unlikely to achieve success. Success, in this context, requires significant efforts because deceiving search engines, developed by the world’s best specialists, is ultimately futile.

The only practical thing to do is to create and develop a quality resource. To achieve this, it is best to build a website from the start on a proper content management system, saving the owner from many additional expenses and associated problems. Being beautiful and “custom-made” does not necessarily mean it’s right. At least, from the perspective of the true goal—creating an online tool for attracting customers.

Once the site is created, it needs continuous development. Promotion primarily involves filling it with quality content—texts that answer the queries people search for on the internet.

Website promotion in search results, achieving top positions, is more of an art than a science, no matter what anyone says. Algorithms today rely on end-users, visitors, and their reactions. And these are living people who act not according to specific algorithms. They either like it, or they don’t, and nothing will make them stay for even a second longer if the site doesn’t meet their expectations.

This is precisely what we offer, unlike other SEO specialists. We cannot and do not plan to deceive search engines. In the end, such tactics will be caught and penalized in search results. Any illicit methods will not work for long—the loopholes will be closed, and the site will end up where it should be.

All that can be done for website promotion is to develop it and fill it with content. Whether we do it for you or you do it yourself—that’s your decision.