Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization plays an important role in promoting online marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. Your website should be optimized for search engines so that potential customers can find it when searching for the products or services you offer. Some key SEO strategies include:

• Keyword Research: Perform keyword research to determine the most popular queries related to your niche. Include these keywords in the titles, descriptions, and content on your website;
• Meta tag optimization: Create unique and informative meta tags for every page on your site, including titles and descriptions;
• Quality Content Creation: Provide useful and interesting content on your website that will attract the attention of users and search engines;
• Linking Strategy: Develop a strategy to get quality backlinks to your website. This will help to improve its search engine ranking.

Search Engine Advertising Campaigns (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) advertising campaigns are another effective strategy for attracting traffic to your website. SEM involves Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and the appearance of your website in search results. Here are some important aspects of search engine advertising campaigns:

• Keywords: Identify the keywords that are most relevant to your business and customize the campaign based on those words;
• Relevancy: Ensure relevancy between keywords, ads and landing pages. This will help increase your Quality Score and lower your cost per click;
• Testing and Optimization: Continually test and optimize your ad campaigns. Study the results and make necessary changes to improve their performance.

Social Media Advertising

Social media provides excellent opportunities to promote online marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. Here are some social media advertising strategies:

• Targeted Advertising: Use the targeting capabilities of social media to reach your target audience. Determine your audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviors to tailor ads that will appeal to them most;
• Audience Engagement: Engage your audience with interesting and compelling content. Ask questions, conduct polls and organize contests to increase user interaction with your brand.
• Advertise on video hosting platforms: Use popular video hosting platforms such as YouTube to post promotional videos. Video can be a powerful tool to attract attention and increase conversions.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies for attracting and retaining customers on your online marketplace or e-commerce platform. Here are some key aspects of email marketing:

• Collect subscribers: Create a mechanism to collect email addresses of potential customers. For example, invite them to sign up for a newsletter or receive special offers;
• Personalization: Personalize your emails by addressing customers by name and offering personalized recommendations based on their previous purchases or interests;
• Automation: Use automation to send emails to specific stages of the sales funnel. For example, after user registration or checkout.

Conclusion

It can be said that advertising strategies play an important role in the successful promotion of online marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. Each of the described strategies has its advantages and disadvantages, and the best approach would be to combine several of them according to the peculiarities of your business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fundamental element of a successful advertising strategy. Optimizing your website for search engines will help increase its visibility and attract organic traffic.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns allow you to launch ads quickly and target your audience accurately. Proper campaign setup and optimization will help achieve high conversion rates.

Social media advertising provides ample opportunities to engage with the target audience and increase brand awareness. Targeted advertising and interesting content will help to attract attention and retain users.

Email marketing is an effective tool to retain customers and interact with them directly. Message personalization and automation will achieve greater effectiveness and audience responsiveness.

Don’t forget that an effective advertising strategy should be flexible and constantly analyzed and optimized according to results and market trends. Constant testing, data insights and adaptation will help you achieve success in promoting your online marketplace or e-commerce platform.

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In order for a site to get high positions in the output, it is not enough to have quality content filled with keywords and anchor links, and relevant to queries in search engines. It is important to work the site through the key elements that make up technical optimization:

• crawling;
• indexing;
• visualization;
• site structure.

Bringing these indicators to perfection will improve the quality and speed of crawling and indexing of site pages by search engines, improve user experience, increase conversions and site authority.

Why do you need to optimize your site technically?

Search engines are set up to show users the content they find most useful. There is a whole algorithm by which Yandex, Google and other systems search for relevant sites, pre-scanning and evaluating web pages on certain parameters. The better fine-tuned technical settings, the more convenient it is for the search engine to evaluate the site. As a result of excellent optimization – getting into the top 10 in the search engine.

Technical optimization is aimed at improving the comfort of users when working in the network, its main purpose – to make the website fast, reliable and simple. Negligent attitude, as well as excessive fanaticism, can cost too much. It is better to stick to the golden mean and focus on the needs of the user and search engine criteria.

Criteria for the quality of the site

The main criteria for the technical quality of the site are:

• site loading speed;
• adaptability of the site;
• site security;
• site map and indexing;
• structure optimization;
• optimization of site content.

Next, let’s break down these criteria in more detail.

Loading speed

Page load speed – one of the first significant components that affect the ranking of the site. This parameter – is part of the recently published Google Core Web Vitals ranking factor. It is believed that this parameter is analogous to face-to-face communication between people and the delay in loading is equivalent to a long pause in a conversation. If a page takes more than three seconds to load, users lose interest in it. For most sites, this is a definite loss of customers and reduced profits.

Nevertheless, this indicator remains a sore spot for optimizers, because the abundance of pictures or the presence of developer errors can lead to a critical loss of site speed. Before adjusting this indicator, it is important to understand what factors affect the speed of page loading. First of all, these are:

• server response speed;
• time to first byte arrival (TTFB);
• time of page code processing and content loading;
• start of rendering (appearance of page visibility).

These indicators depend on various criteria (page code cleanliness, correctness of site structure and layout, file weight) and directly affect ranking. So, the less TTFB, the higher the page in the Google rendition. When choosing hosting should stop at the option that has the best speed of access to the site and the shortest period of resource unavailability in case of technical problems.

Adaptation for mobile devices

Most users value their time and prefer to access sites from any device. Therefore, the mobile version is another important criterion for retaining positions in the top. If the “lame” interface of the page when loading from a mobile device or it is inconvenient to read, most likely the user will prefer to leave it.

But even with excellent adaptation, the loading speed remains an important indicator. It can differ significantly from the PC version and affect the result of ranking. Therefore, when launching the site, it should be checked on popular mobile browsers.

It should be taken into account that the search results for mobile and desktop versions of the site in different browsers are different. So, Yandex has a common output, so the lack of a mobile version can completely pessimize the resource (that is, lower its position in the search engine). Google shares rendition, but the priority is the mobile version. Its absence will affect the ranking.

Safety

Back in 2014, Google identified the use of SSL protocol as a ranking factor. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a certificate that authenticates a website. It confirms that your domain has an individual key with which the information between the server and the user is encrypted and therefore a secure connection is established.

Scanning and indexing: basic principles and impact on the result of optimization

In order for a website to get into the search engine results, a correct search index is necessary. It means that the search engine has evaluated and memorized the page, and will show it at the appropriate query.

Scanning is the initial stage when the system “sends” its robots, crawlers or spiders to get to know the site. “Running” on the pages, they read the data and index them. After that, the search engine analyzes the information, determines the keys for each page and stores the data in the search index. Each search engine conducts indexing according to its own principles.

For example, indexing in Google is based on the mobile version of the site. At the same time, the indexes in Google are constantly updated. The quality of pages and their relevance is determined by more than 200 ranking factors; the best quality pages are selected and they are included in the query. Low-quality pages are downgraded but not removed from the index.

Of great importance in the effectiveness of scanning and indexing is the architecture of the site. The deeper the construction and the farther the pages are located from home, the more difficult it is for the system to identify them. And in the presence of a large number of internal links, it becomes even more difficult for search engines.

Therefore, it is better to stick to the flat construction, which is more convenient for both robots and users. In this case, the rule of “three clicks” to get to the desired page from the main page is preserved.

The technical aspect of SEO is one of the most significant. It can be carried out both independently and with the help of specialists, but in any of these options you will need specialized services that will simplify the already resource-intensive work. We have also determined the indicators of the basic technical audit and selected the most important services for technical SEO work.

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• Content Quality: This is one of the most important ranking factors. Content should be unique, useful, and relevant to user queries;
• Keywords: Using the right keyword phrases helps search engines understand what your site is about. But it is important to avoid their overabundance, as it can lead to lower positions and even filters;
• Optimization for mobile devices: With most searches now being made from cell phones, it’s important that your site displays correctly and is easy to use on them;
• Loading speed: If pages load slowly, user experience and ranking will be negatively impacted;
• Backlinks (links from other sites to yours): these still play an important role in SEO. However, it is important that these links are of high quality and come from authoritative and relevant resources;
• Time and depth of visits, bounce rate: These metrics tell search engines how interesting and useful the content is. The more time people spend on a site and the less they leave it after viewing a single page, the better. Recent algorithm updates emphasize user experience;
• Structure and URLs: A well-structured site with CNC (human-understandable) URLs helps search engines better index the site – which means all pages will be considered;
• Social Signals: Although search engines claim that social signals (such as likes, likes and comments on social media) do not affect ranking, many SEO experts believe they play a role in the search engines’ overall perception of a site;
• Technical SEO: Technical factors such as the use of HTTPS, micro markup, robots.txt file, correct sitemap file help search engines index the site effectively;
• Images: Optimized images (correct size, use of alt attribute, description) can improve SEO, especially in the context of image search.

It’s important to remember that no single ranking factor works on its own. Search engines use hundreds of different signals and their interactions to determine which site deserves the highest spot in the top. In addition, the weight of each factor can change over time and depending on the specific query. Therefore, it is important to maintain a constant focus on all aspects.

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• Long-term results: Unlike some other forms of online advertising, the results of SEO promotion are usually long-term. Once optimized, a website continues to attract visitors from search engines for a long time to come;
• Targeted Visits: helps attract users who are actively searching for information, products or services that are relevant to your site’s content. This increases the likelihood of visitors becoming customers;
• Free traffic: SEO promotion aims to attract natural traffic from search engines, which is free. This makes it more effective in terms of investment compared to some other types of advertising;
• Improved user experience: work is done to improve the usability and understandability of the website for users;
• Higher ROI (percentage of revenue to business investment): Due to the targeted traffic and free nature of organic search, SEO can provide high ROI compared to other methods of advertising;
• Working with mobile devices: In the context of current trends, SEO also includes optimization for mobile devices to reach a wide audience of users;
• Advantage over competitors: If your competitors are not using SEO, or are using it ineffectively, this gives you a significant advantage. If your competitors are already using it, then you then need to work even more effectively to keep up.

These benefits make SEO promotion a valuable tool for any business looking to increase their online visibility and attract more customers. However, it’s important to remember that despite all the benefits, SEO is not a panacea and should be part of an overall marketing strategy.

Disadvantages of SEO

Despite the many benefits, SEO promotion also has certain disadvantages that you should be aware of:

• Time: the problem is that the process takes quite a long time. It may take several months before you see noticeable results. This is because search engines take time to index and rank;
• No guarantees: Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, and no one can guarantee accurate results. Even if you’ve done everything right, there’s a chance that your site won’t reach the top positions;
• Unpredictability: Changes in search engine algorithms can lead to unpredictable results. For example, a website may lose its position due to a new algorithm or update;
• Risk of penalties: If your SEO strategy includes practices that search engines consider unacceptable (such as using spam or buying links), your site may be subject to penalties that can seriously affect its ranking;
• Resources: a significant investment of time and money is required. You need to constantly analyze, test and adjust your strategy, create quality content, conduct technical optimization, and so on.

In the end, despite the drawbacks, SEO-promotion remains one of the most effective methods of attracting targeted traffic to a website.

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SEO includes many strategies and techniques that aim to increase the visibility of a website. For example, it can include optimizing content on a website for specific keywords, improving page load speed, improving the structure of a website, placing links from other web resources, and more.

While SEO can be a complex field, the basic principle is quite simple: create a website that is useful and accessible to visitors. If your resource offers valuable information and is easy to find through search engines, this will increase its chances of successful promotion.

It’s important to note that SEO is a process that takes time. It is not an instant solution, but a strategy that can yield significant long-term results if used correctly.

Who is engaged in SEO promotion

SEO-promotion of websites is handled by various specialists. In small companies or startups, this function can be performed by a webmaster or a marketer familiar with the basics of SEO.

Large companies, especially those that have a significant number of resources, often hire SEO-specialists in the staff. They are responsible for creating and implementing the SEO strategy, as well as analyzing the results and making adjustments to improve it.

There are also SEO agencies that offer their services to businesses. They have a large number of resources and specialists: SEO specialists, programmers, marketers, designers, layout designers, copywriters, etc., which allows them to manage several projects at once and achieve good results, since promotion is their specialty.

Another option is freelancers who specialize in SEO. They often focus on specific aspects such as site audits, meta tag customization, content promotion, etc. They are considered less effective because one person cannot do quality work in many areas at once.

What are the goals and objectives of SEO promotion

SEO-promotion sets itself a number of key objectives, which together are aimed at increasing the visibility of the site in search engines, attracting the target audience and improving user experience.

• Keyword selection: In order for a website to attract relevant visitors, you need to know exactly what queries they are typing into the search box. Keyword research helps determine what phrases and words should be used to populate the site’s content;
• Content Optimization: Website content should not only be unique and of high quality, but also optimized for key queries. This includes proper use of headings, subheadings, alternative image text, meta tags and other SEO elements;
• Technical optimization: Search engine robots prefer websites that are easy to scan and index. This includes optimizing the site structure, improving page load speed, fixing code errors, setting up redirects, creating a sitemap, etc;
• Working on your link profile: An important ranking factor is the number and quality of external links leading to your site. Building a link profile includes working on getting quality backlinks and managing internal links;
• Improving User Experience (UX): Search engines are increasingly paying attention to factors such as page load time, site structure, mobile optimization, and other UX elements. Optimizing these elements helps improve search engine rankings;
• Analyzing results and adjusting strategy: SEO is a process of continuous analysis and improvement. With the help of analytical tools, it is necessary to regularly check the effectiveness of the methods used and, if necessary, adjust the promotion strategy.

The realization of these tasks helps not only to improve the visibility of the site in search engines, but also to increase user satisfaction, which in turn helps to increase conversions on the site (e.g. purchases, subscriptions or inquiries).

It should be noted that all of the aforementioned tasks should be accomplished in tandem, as they are interrelated. However, each website has its own unique features, and each project needs a customized approach.

Additionally, SEO-specialists should constantly monitor the updates of search engine algorithms to timely adapt the strategy to new requirements and maintain or improve the position of the site.

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Image Optimization

Format

Each image format has its own advantages and is suitable for certain types of images. For example, JPEG (or JPG) is suitable for photographs and images with many shades of color. It provides good compression and preserves image details. PNG – the most suitable format for images with transparency or text. It preserves sharper lines and is a good choice for logos and icons.

Compression

Image compression tools help to reduce the size of image files without significantly reducing the quality. This removes redundant information such as unnecessary metadata and hidden colors while maintaining the visual quality of the image. Here are some popular compression tools: Kraken.io, TinyPNG, iloveimg.com, Compressor.io, etc. You can also enable image conversion to WebP format. According to the company it provides 26% reduction in image size compared to PNG format and 25-34% reduction compared to JPEG format.

Deferred Upload

Deferred image loading allows images to be loaded only when they become visible on the user’s screen. This is especially useful for pages with a large number of images or long pages. There are different techniques, such as:

• Lazy loading (lazy loading). Allows images to load only as the page scrolls. Plugins and libraries such as LazyLoad or Intersection Observer API help with this;
• Image loading optimization plugins. There are various plugins and extensions for content management platforms (CMS) that automatically apply delayed image loading or optimize the loading process. For example, WP Smush for WordPress.

Optimizing your site’s code

Another way to optimize is to reduce the size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files by removing comments, extra spaces, and line breaks. Combine CSS and JavaScript files into a single file to reduce the number of requests to the server. This can be done using build tools such as Webpack or Gulp.

It is also recommended to place the CSS code at the beginning of the page and the scripts at the end. This approach allows the browser to start displaying the page before all scripts are loaded, which reduces load time and improves the user experience.

Avoid using inline CSS and JS code. Instead, you should take CSS and JS code to external files. This allows browsers to cache these resources and speeds up page load times.

Using caching and CDNs

Enabling caching on the server allows static resources such as images, CSS and JavaScript files to be stored on the client side. In doing so, the resources are loaded and cached by the user’s browser, allowing the resources to be reused without having to be downloaded from the server on each request. This significantly reduces page load time for repeat visits and improves performance.

Use a CDN (content delivery network) to distribute copies of content to servers located in different regions of the world and provide site acceleration. A CDN works on the following principle: the closest server serves user requests, which reduces download time. When a user requests a resource from a website, he gets it from the closest CDN server rather than the primary server.

When resources are cached on the client side and distributed across CDN servers, you have the ability to deliver content with minimal latency and provide fast access for users anywhere in the world.

Minimize redirects and broken links

Avoid overuse of redirects on your website. Redirects add an extra step when loading a page, which can slow it down. Check your URL structure and coding to make sure they are optimized and minimized. Try to use direct links where possible and avoid redirect chains.

Regularly check your site for broken links and fix them. Broken links that lead to non-existent or inaccessible pages can negatively impact user experience and loading speed.

Cloud provider and server

When choosing a hosting provider, it is advisable to pay attention to their performance and reliability. A well-chosen hosting service with optimized infrastructure, high bandwidth and low latency can significantly improve server response time.

Keep your server software and its components, such as the web server (e.g. Apache or Nginx), PHP or other programming languages, updated. This allows you to use the latest security patches and performance optimizations.

How to speed up your site

Now let’s look at how you can improve the hardware component of your infrastructure to ensure that your website loads faster.

1. Choose the right cloud provider

Cloud hosting platforms offer scalability and flexibility, allowing a website to utilize the resources of multiple servers. This makes it possible to handle high traffic volume and provide high availability. A VPS server offers an isolated virtual environment that mimics a dedicated server. It provides more resources and control than regular shared hosting. A dedicated server provides full computing resources of a single server for your website. It provides high performance and control, but can be more expensive and require more management. Choosing the right type of hosting depends on the requirements of your site and expected traffic volume.

2. Optimize your server settings to increase performance. This may include adjusting memory, CPU, cache and other settings to ensure requests are processed quickly.
3. Update server software such as the web server (such as Apache or Nginx), database, and programming languages. New versions of software often include performance improvements and bug fixes.
4. Optimize the database for fast access and processing of data.

Use the EXPLAIN command on your database to analyze and understand which queries are running slowly. This may include changing the query structure, adding indexes, or reconsidering the use of tables and relationships. Caching responses to frequently repeated queries can significantly speed up database performance. Instead of executing the query each time, the database can give the already stored result from the cache. This is especially useful for dynamic sites where content is generated frequently and may be the same for multiple users. Setting up indexes in the database allows you to efficiently search for data across tables. Indexes are created on indexed fields and significantly speed up the search process.

5. Load balancing and clustering allow load balancing across multiple servers, which improves performance and provides fault tolerance. Principles include:

Distributing traffic across multiple servers to evenly distribute the load and ensure high availability.

Combining multiple servers into a cluster to handle traffic and provide fault tolerance. The cluster can include data replication, resource sharing, and automatic recovery.

6. Use of SSD storage:

Using fast and efficient SSD storage instead of traditional HDDs can significantly improve performance. SSD storage has faster data read and write speeds, which speeds up query processing and content loading.

7. Network infrastructure:

Hosting the site on hosting providers with high-speed network connectivity and utilizing networking technologies such as CDNs help ensure fast delivery of content to users anywhere in the world.

Performance optimization is not a one-time action. Websites and their requirements are constantly changing, and users expect ever faster and more responsive sites. Therefore, it is important to understand that optimization is an ongoing process that should be part of your daily website development and maintenance practices.

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Google PageSpeed Insights

A free tool from Google that helps to evaluate the performance and loading speed of a website. Google Page Speed analyzes page load time, server response time, image optimization, caching and other parameters. The tool gives an overall assessment of loading speed for mobile and desktop devices, as well as recommendations on how to improve performance.

GTmetrix

Like Google PageSpeed Insights this website page load speed service or tool provides a detailed analysis of its performance. It evaluates the loading speed, server response time, page size and more. GTmetrix offers recommendations to improve performance, including caching, resource compression, and code optimization.

Pingdom

A service provided by Pingdom AB allows you to measure site performance and monitor site availability. This tool allows you to check the speed of your site from different servers located in different parts of the world. Provides detailed reports on the load time of each web page element such as images, CSS styles, JavaScript scripts and other resources. Shows server response time and total page size. This data can help you identify problem areas and determine which page components are taking longer to load.

Take a close look at the recommendations provided by the performance analysis tool. They may indicate steps to optimize site loading. For example, implementing caching, using a CDN (content delivery network), improving code, or optimizing resources. Figure out which of these recommendations can be applied to your site and start implementing them. When interpreting the results, you should pay attention to the following parameters:

• Page load time;
• Evaluate the overall time of your site. If it exceeds the recommended values (usually less than 3 seconds), it may indicate issues that need to be optimized;
• Server response time;
• This is the time it takes for the server to process a request. If the server response time is high, it may indicate a problem with your hosting or server configuration;
• Page size and number of requests;
• Large page sizes and many requests can slow down loading times. Pay attention to page size and number of requests, and try to reduce them by compressing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, combining them into a single file, or using caching;
• Prioritize tasks;
• Identify problem areas and prioritize them. Focus on those aspects that have the biggest impact on loading speed and performance. For example, if image size is a major issue, start by optimizing them;
• Testing and re-analyzing;
• After making changes and optimizing the site, re-analyze its performance using tools. This will allow you to see the result of the changes you made and allow you to continue optimizing if necessary.

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