Website promotion means improving a site's position in search engines. For certain queries that users type into the search box, successfully promoted sites appear in the top positions.
If a website has been built but no one is working on promoting it, hardly anyone will ever find out about it. That means the time and money spent won't pay off, because promotion also requires investment.
What "the top" means
We borrowed the word "top" from English. It means the summit, and here it refers to the highest position in search results or one close to it.
How a website gets to the top
Getting a website to the top is quite difficult. For promotion to succeed, it must be handled by someone who knows the subject inside out (an SEO specialist).
The main stages of promotion
First of all, look at your competitors and, to avoid getting lost among them and becoming part of the crowd, choose a topic and focus that set you apart favourably.
Next, think about building a semantic core. A semantic core is a set of keywords and phrases placed on the site's pages.
To find out which keywords are best, use dedicated tools, many of which are free. They show how many times users have searched for a particular query.
When a word is searched very often, the query is called high-volume. When, for example, "kittens on a branch" is searched by 100 to 1,000 users, it's a low-volume query. There are also mid-volume queries.
If your site is brand new, it's better to target low-volume keywords. Otherwise you risk running into many serious problems that can hold back your site in search results.
The next step is to remove all low-interest queries and keep only those that interest most of your target audience (a website should first and foremost be aimed at its audience).
Once the semantic core is ready, the site needs optimisation. There are two types: on-page and off-page.
On-page optimisation checks for duplicate articles. If there are any, the duplicates must be removed. Work is also done to make the site convenient for visitors (in terms of both speed and interface).
Off-page optimisation means building backlinks. This stage requires caution, or a link explosion is inevitable.
The next stage (attracting traffic) requires maximum effort. To attract visitors, site owners often turn to digital marketers for help.
How long it takes to reach the top
For a site to appear in the top positions of search engines, it can take anywhere from 6 months to 1–2 years. The least fortunate owners reach the top after 5 years. Some achieve nothing even after that many years and give up. The luckiest get their sites to the top in just 1, 2 or 3 months.
SEO specialists say that to get a site to the top as quickly as possible, you need to consider a range of factors, one of which is the owner's budget.
But budget alone isn't a guarantee, as even expensive SEO specialists may simply fail to deliver on their promises. So before choosing someone, you need to know what problems you might face at this stage.
What not to do
When promoting a site, you must follow certain rules. Break them and your site can get banned, never to be seen in search results again.
First and foremost, don't spam in any way. Don't insert keywords that don't match the topics of your articles. Using bots for automated promotion is also a bad idea.
It's bad when an owner forgets about the site for a long time, doesn't remove broken links, uses barely visible text, or leaves links to the site on unverified or inappropriate sources.
Plagiarising other people's content and having empty pages won't bring success either.
Forget about doorway pages too — special sites or individual web pages stuffed with keywords on a particular topic.
What Google likes
Google favours old, trusted domains, internal linking and site-wide pages. It prefers synonyms to exact-match keywords and welcomes regular content updates.
Google also likes keywords tied to specific regions.
What the owner gets by reaching the top 3
The top 3 positions in search engines are the dream of most website owners. If your site is at the top, it opens up a world of opportunities.
Advertisers will start reaching out with various deals. It also becomes easier to launch side projects and attract even more visitors to both the site and those projects — much faster than when no one knew about your site.
And that's far from all — the possibilities depend on the site owner's skills and ambitions.
Cyborg Studio is a team of professionals who will help you turn all your ideas into reality.
If you have a website and want to take it to the top of search results, call us: +380 67 250 60 02
