Our subscribers often ask if it is possible to promote a website with a zero budget and, if so, how to implement it in practice. They assure that they can do almost all the work on their own – they have the necessary skills, time and desire. All they need is a clear guide to action, a step-by-step list of recommendations, following which, you can achieve no less outstanding results than if they turned to a specialized agency.
Well, we’ll give you this list. But I want to warn you right away: following our recommendations, you take full responsibility for what will happen to your site. Do not think that we doubt the usefulness of our advice. It’s just that I personally find it difficult to imagine a person who can perform the work of nine (!) Different specialists with high quality: SEO optimizer, programmer, web analyst, designer, layout designer, content strategist, copywriter, editor and SMM specialist. Therefore, if you are confident in your abilities, we add the article to bookmarks and begin to slowly implement what is written in it.
1. Registration in Yandex. Webmaster and Search Console
By registering in the panels for webmasters, you can find out all the information about site indexing, crawling errors, imposed sanctions, in general, about everything related to the “visibility” of your site in search engines. Without registration in these two panels, competent complex website promotion is impossible.
2. Installation of counters for three statistics services
Yandex.Metrica, Google Analytics and Live internet – all three of these counters must be correctly installed on your site. Why is there necessarily three? It’s simple – if any of the counters fails or for some reason starts broadcasting incorrect data to you, you can always get reliable information from the remaining two.
3. Registration in all popular social networks
Komatke, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Odontoclastic, Telegram, Pinterest, Yandex. Zen – you must register in all popular social networks and instant messengers. Some of them will be more effective for your topic, some less, but you need to be present in all of them, because you never know what material will “shoot” and where. Grab any opportunity to increase your reach, test different sites, and, of course, think about your users: let them have the opportunity to communicate with your company on the site where it is convenient for them.
4. Removing the main indicators of the site
- The number of indexed pages in Yandex and Google
The total number of pages on your site and the number of indexed pages should be approximately the same. If there are many fewer pages in the index than there are on your site, this may mean the following problems: your content is poorly optimized for search engines, you accidentally blocked them from indexing, a filter was applied to the site, and so on. These are the basic things to check if you want good results from website promotion. A complete list of reasons for poor indexing can be found in the instructions of Google and Yandex . Sometimes a webmaster deliberately closes pages from indexing. For example, WordPress site owners often hide category and tag pages from robots to avoid duplicate content.
Identification and elimination of major technical errors
We recommend starting the study of this section with the video – ” 11 mistakes in website promotion that everyone makes .” In it, we not only talked about errors, but also shared several cases on client projects:
- How we have tripled the reference mass of Aratani Mir in two months. Naturally, without any purchases!
- How we expanded the subject of a client selling cattle machines, whose most frequent request is 1500 according to Word stat.
- How, with the help of adaptive design, the mobile traffic for Terpolymer increased 8 times (not the simplest topic, as you understand).
5. robots.txt file
Robots.txt is a file that contains parameters for indexing a site. The robots.txt file must be correct. You can check this using a special service from Yandex. The file must contain several mandatory directives, correctly composed and loaded into the site root.
6. XML sitemap
Using sitemap.xml, we tell the search engine which pages of your resource need to be indexed and how often they are updated. Details on how to create a sitemap and what requirements it must meet is written in our guide .
7. Determination of the main site mirror
For search engines, a domain with www and without www is two completely different sites. In order to show them that this is one site, so that they index and rank it as a whole, it is necessary to put 301 redirects from the secondary domain to the main one (SEO company-optimizers call it the main mirror).
For instructions on setting up your primary mirror, see our detailed guide .
8. Duplicate home page
Duplication of links to the same page of the site is not welcomed by search engines. Therefore, if your main page has several duplicates (for example, http://www.site.ru/, http://www.site.ru/index.html and http://www.site.ru/index. php), you need to get rid of them urgently. The task is solved by setting up a CMS or specifying redirects. A guide on setting up redirects will help here .
9. Duplicate content
To find duplicate content, let’s use the free Xenu program. Download from the link, install and run. After that, click File – Check URL, type in the domain of your site and click OK. After the application crawls your site, select sorting by Title and see which titles are repeated.
