Affordable Search Engine Optimization

How Indirect SEO Works

• You post an informational article (specifically informational, not advertising) related to the product of your activity on any relevant Internet resource (forum, community, Internet edition).
• Your article can reach the top positions of the search results for certain queries.
• A user visits this resource, reads your article.
• If a visitor is interested in your information and you, he can become a visitor to your site (follow the link from the article to your site, if the Internet resource allows you to place links, either by the name of the company or by the name and surname).

A living example is my article “What are CRM systems and how to choose them correctly”, which I posted on Habrahabr. It ranks second after Wikipedia in Google search results for the query “What is CRM” or simply “CRM”. Many of my clients found me precisely because of this and other articles posted on Habrahabr, went to my site and contacted me personally. It's indirect SEO, but it's still SEO. I get search engine visitors, although not directly through my site.

There's nowhere without history

In order to better understand what Affordable Search Engine Optimization is and how the current situation has developed, we need to dive into the history of the issue. When search engines first appeared (from the Russian ones, they were Rambler, Mail, Yandex), the influence of sites on the search results was great, since there were not so many sites themselves as now, and the search engines themselves were not yet so developed.

What time was it? It was a time of experimentation. The Internet (in its modern sense) was only in its infancy at that time. Accordingly, many practices have not yet been developed. Search engines were then one of the sources of information. They were not so highly developed and did not dictate their terms to the market yet.

I still found such a time when sites were called by ear, or transmitted direct links, and their names were entered directly into the address bar. Today, even if the name of the site is known, as a rule, it is still entered into a search engine. Some today do not even know what an address bar is, and in almost all browsers it is no longer just an address bar, but a search bar.

How was SERP ranking before? The search engines took into account the following data:

• page structure (so-called meta tags, headings, keywords);
• the number of links leading to the site.

The more links led to the site and the more correct the page was from a technical point of view, the more likely the site was to be in the top positions of the search results.

Why was it so crucial in the past? Because search engines didn’t have the same power as they do now, and such sophisticated ranking algorithms haven’t been invented. For example, Yandex search as of 98th year worked on only three computers. Search engines have to some extent been forced to “trust” the creators of the sites.

And it was then that speculation and manipulation of search results began. Various “gray” and “black” promotion methods appeared (link exchanges and various tools for meta tags, etc.) You could buy thousands of links on thousands of sites and be in the top of the search results.

Then search engines began to actively develop. And now the algorithms for ranking these search engines have improved so much that we can say that the number of links and page structures are not as important to them as they used to be.

Google recommendations

Google and Yandex in their recommendations say that you do not need to be puzzled by the internal structure of the site and how the page looks for search engines, you must first of all think about how visitors will read it. Search engines began to look at sites from the point of view of the visitor and increasingly come closer to the human understanding of content.

I want to clarify a few points. The fact that page structure is not so important for search engines right now does not mean that you do not need to fill in titles, descriptions, etc. This must be done, but not from the point of view of the search engine, but from the point of view of the visitor. Search engines display exactly the site names and meta descriptions as search results, so they must be present on every page.

I would also like to draw your attention to one nuance. Yes, meta tags are not that important for search engines right now, but you shouldn't confuse meta tags with other information descriptions. In addition to text, there are various elements on the page: photos, videos, etc. These are more complex formats for indexing. Search engines cannot figure out yet what is contained in a video or photo. They can only figure this out if we create a textual description for this kind of content. Therefore, such descriptions must be added to the site (using alt-text). This helps search engines better understand what images and videos are on your site, which in turn makes them more likely to appear in image and video search results.