SEO Guide for Beginners – Learn SEO Step by Step

Professional website promotion work consists of dozens of actions that the promoter performs throughout the life of his promotion work on a particular project.

There are hundreds of parameters that affect a site’s position in search engines (primarily Google’s search engine), when dozens of actions performed by the promoter will affect those parameters for better or worse and will give the site the “points” that will determine where it will be ranked in the Google and other search engine results hierarchy.

This website promotion guide will be a comprehensive guide that will show you a large part of the actions that the promoter needs to perform, why they are important and sometimes we will also recommend tools for use in the same field. 

Of course, we recommend that you read and deepen your knowledge with more comprehensive and detailed articles for each dedicated topic found on our blog.

We have divided this guide into two main areas of organic promotion: on site and off site. That is, promotional work carried out on the site itself and promotional work carried out outside the site. If you are taking your first steps in the world of SEO, we recommend first reading our SEO guide for beginners, and then coming back to this guide.

On-Site website promotion

On-Site website promotion includes many actions performed within the site. These actions are very important both for the organic promotion of the site and for improving the performance of the site with various contexts: conversion rates, user experience and more. In other words – performing actions whose purpose is to improve all possible aspects within the website in order to promote our marketing goals.

Website construction, design and structure

The basic work begins of course with the construction of the website and its design. At the beginning of any promotion work or construction of a website, you must first characterize the business, the website and the target audience. 

An analysis of all this data will help you build the site in such a way that the marketing filter on the site will lead the surfers somewhere: leave details on the site, purchase a product, download a book, register on the site and comment on it, and more.

Sometimes there is more than one goal for a website (unlike, for example, its landing page has only one goal). The construction of the site and its design will affect the first impression on the surfers who come to the site as well as the user experience on the site. 

These will affect various indicators such as abandonment rate, time spent on the website, switching between pages on the website, responses, shares and various indicators that Google also attaches importance to building the website’s reputation and therefore also on the website’s positions in Google.

The architectural structure of the site is more related to the content hierarchy on your site which will affect the importance of the key phrases you promote and their authority in the eyes of Google. 

Building a site optimized for organic promotion

Many website builders do not take into account search engine compatibility issues in the website building process. Sometimes because they were not required to do so and sometimes for the simple reason that they do not know the ins and outs of SEO well enough. That is why it is important to make sure that the website is built taking into account the promotion needs that follow.

There are several actions that can be taken while building a website that will later save you a lot of time and money when you want to start the promotion process. For example: adapting the website to mobile, using a minimum of unnecessary code and plugins, uploading images of suitable sizes, building on a friendly platform for organic promotion (like the popular WordPress for example), creating a correct content hierarchy and so on.

Bottom line, be sure to go a little deeper on the subject and make sure that your website will be ready in advance for the start of the promotion work.

Website architecture, menus and convenient and efficient navigation

E0very building has a skeleton on which the building is built. If something is wrong with the skeleton the building may collapse. If there is no stairwell or elevator it will significantly affect the quality of life of the tenants and they may not even want to live in this building and not even stay there for too long either.

In a sharp transition to the Internet world, a website without good foundations may cause damage to the organic promotion in Google and the user experience of the surfers on the website. In both cases, the damage to the site’s position in Google will be significant and even more important – those who have already reached the site will have difficulty navigating it and finding what they are looking for, and therefore they will quickly leave the site and most likely reach your competitors.

When we talk about the website architecture, menus and convenient and efficient navigation we are talking about:

• Pleasant design and easy on the eye.
• Correct utilization of white space on the site.
• Content presented in an orderly manner. That is, the surfer understands what is a top menu, what is a side menu and what is the area where the main content is displayed.
• Correct management of the navigation menus on the site. For example: a side menu if you don’t need it to appear on the home page, it’s better to keep it only for the internal pages. The main menu will be at the top of the site but will not take up much space from the content display area and on the other hand will not be hidden within the content and will allow easy and convenient finding and navigation.
• Adding an accessibility plugin to the site to allow people with disabilities a more comfortable and pleasant browsing experience.
• Do not load details on the surfer immediately when he arrives at the site.
• Adding a search area to perform a quick search on the site.
• Introducing several quick options for contacting the owners of the site/business so that the surfers do not search too much for the contact options and it is also useful to present several options (email, phone, WhatsApp, chat, etc.) so that everyone can choose what is convenient for them.

Choosing storage for the site

The promotion of the website starts already at the stages  of choosing the storage . There are several types of storage that you should know and what is best for our site. Also, there are hosting packages where a single website is maintained and there are hosting packages that can be used to host multiple websites.

• What is better and when is it better?
• How can the size of our hosting package affect the loading speed of the site?
• Does the package match the size of our site or its expected size?
• Are the servers located in Israel or close to Israel? 

If the servers are geographically far from Israel and the target audience of the site is Israeli, it is possible that this will affect the browsing speed of your site. An incorrect choice of storage can cause the website to crash frequently, lose many surfers and even damage your position in the search engines.

Writing content for the website and optimizing existing content

The content is an integral and even main part of any organic promotion procedure. Search engines are based on scanning the content on your site. They do not scan images, videos except for their codes and tags that you define, so the way search engines link surfers to specific pages on your website is through the textual content on your website. 

The structure of your article, the length of the article, the correct combination of the key phrases, making various adjustments for promotion needs on the one hand but as a response to customers on the other – all these and other additional parameters will be critical in everything related to the promotion of your website, therefore it is important to deepen your knowledge of them and know how to carry them out correctly and professionally.

How to adjust the content on our website for organic promotion?

We talked about the fact that the content is a very important part of the organic promotion process and maybe even the most important part of it, but what about how the content should look?

After all, on the one hand, there are various parameters that must be met in order to present to Google “Hey, this page does such and such on the subject” and on the other hand, we want the content to be natural, with a fluent and interesting reading as much as possible and, of course, one that answers the customer’s need.

That is, if the title says “a guide to building a pergola for the garden” then in the content itself we will really get a step-by-step construction guide for a pergola and not just content that talks about the importance of a pergola for the garden, how much it costs to build a pergola and offer the services of the company to which the article goes.

Maybe the article will be unique and maybe it will have a lot of content, but in practice – what the surfer wanted was a practical guide on how to build the pergola himself. That’s why it’s a bad combination of content on the site, first of all in terms of your access to your surfers and it will also harm the promotion of that page.

Many people will quickly leave the page, not even bothering to read (because they can skim the article for a few seconds with their eyes and only read the subheadings and realize that there is no real guide there). Yes, it would have been correct to include a real guide when at the end you could write “If you want a professional to do the work, then we are here for you… contact us for a quote.” and so’.

Here are some other important parameters:

• The structure of the article – an article should be made up of ordered paragraphs with subheadings between paragraphs or between 2-3 paragraphs as long as they are of course related under the same heading. It is also worth incorporating bullet points (such lists are numbered like this list) to improve the structure, diversify it and maintain order and cleanliness. Besides the importance of the titles at the promotion level, it is also important to allow the surfer a comfortable and pleasant reading on the site.
• The length of the article  – be sure to upload to your website content of at least a few hundred words per page. 300-400 words is the minimum, while 500 word articles may be a great standard. If you can reach the standard of 1000-2000 words of quality articles, that would be excellent, as long as the contents are not repeated within the article like chewing gum of course.
• Key phrase  – each page should have a central key phrase. It should be repeated in the main title of the page, in one of the sub-headings and a few more times within the article itself but not excessively. That is, no more than 2% repetitions of the total number of words in the article. It is useful to combine the phrase also in its different versions but as part of its normal amount of repetitions so as not to create unnecessary spam around the phrase.
• Links  – you should include at least one internal link from your page to another page on your website. You should deepen your knowledge on the subject to know how to do it correctly. Also, occasionally don’t be shy to link to a qualified external source (like Wikipedia and other leading sites) to improve the user experience of your surfers, something that Google will also appreciate.
• Images  – you should add one subject image to each article on your website. In addition, it is important to give it a suitable ALT tag and also a suitable title. You can also add an image or infographic into the text, but do not exaggerate the amount of images on the same page, as this burdens its loading speed.

How to find interesting topics to write for the website?

• Use Google’s keyword tool  –  search for relevant key phrases with a search volume and base the topics for the articles around them. When you get a certain key phrase and with your experience in the field you can come up with ideas for topics.
  For example, if you are a private tutor and the keyword phrase is “private math tutor” then you can come up with article ideas for your website around that phrase. For example: Can a private math teacher deliver private lessons via Zoom and how is this done? or “How can a private math tutor improve your child’s graduation success rate by 87% percent?” and so’.
• Check your competitors –  go to the websites of your competitors who have already thought before you or at the same time as you about new ideas for interesting articles for their website. You will be inspired and discover topics you have not yet written about. Of course you will have to give you your own personal pan and unique approach and not copy from the competitors.
• See what people are asking and what problems they are encountering –  rummage through relevant Facebook groups, forums, websites where people ask questions about the field such as Quora, Reddit, Steeps, etc.
• Search in different languages ​​- you can search for the name of your domain in English with the addition of the word Articles, enter the first 5-10 results in Google and discover dozens or even hundreds of articles in your field in each of them. All you need is to translate the topics into Hebrew and you have ideas for writing.
• Autocompletes and similar searches –  type a certain key phrase in the Google search bar and Google will offer different completions for a longer sentence depending on what people are searching for. Do one of the searches and check the additional phrases that Google offers at the bottom of the search results page. This method will also help you to incorporate into your content phrases that Google recognizes as relevant to the same goal, thereby improving your chances of producing content that hits the mark.

How to check that the content we upload to the site without copied parts?

Copied content uploaded to your site may cause Google to penalize the site severely. Such a punishment can also affect your other sites that are on the same server for that matter. But regardless of other sites – the site where the copied content is uploaded can cause a serious reputation problem in Google because they have zero patience for people who upload spam or copied content to sites.

Even if you did not do it on purpose or you only intended to quote a paragraph or a sentence from another source on the Internet – you should check the contents in Copyscape before you upload them to the website. It can be used in a limited way for free or invest a few dollars and make your life easier. This great tool might cost you a few cents for each such check but it’s definitely worth the peace of mind you get when you upload new content to your site.

The website’s update frequency

How many articles a month is enough? Well, there is no uniform answer to this. Along with sites in certain fields where an article every two weeks may be enough to keep the site at the top of the search results, there are sites that upload several articles a day or more such as news sites, various portals, article sites and more.

Your goal will be to update the site as often as the minimum frequency in which your leading competitors in Google upload. That is, monitor for a month or two the rate of uploading content to the leading sites on Google in your field. If these sites upload one article a week – make sure you also post at least one article a week.

Content for store websites and online commerce

When it comes  to store and online commerce sites  there are several types of content pages on the site that need to be addressed. There is the website blog where you can upload regular articles of several hundred words or more and there are the product pages.

It is likely that on the product page, certainly in online stores where there are hundreds or thousands of products on the site, you will not start making a whole post for each product. But it is definitely recommended to include a paragraph or two about the product, detail it as much as possible and add as much reliable information as possible such as dimensions, weight, raw material, price, etc. Allow people to rate the products from 1 to 5 stars and even leave product reviews.

This may improve your position in Google and even present you in Google’s rich results, which is a result bar that displays products from online stores directly in Google’s search results when searching for a specific product. On the product category pages, try to include even a little more content, even if it is at the bottom of the page after displaying a certain amount of products to surfers.

Defining meta tags: One of the technical works of the organic promotion is the correct definition of the  meta tags on the website. In the past there were more useful and important meta tags for organic promotion, but over the years after several Google updates some of them disappeared.

Today there are a few meta tags that remain important, among them the title tag and the description tag. These two together with a link to your website build the snippet of your website in Google search results.

Types of meta tags that are still relevant

Meta tags are lines of code that are behind the scenes of your site, that is, in the part of the code that Google scans but surfers do not see on the front of the site. These tags are integrated into the code of that specific page and today there are some meta tags that are very important to the organic promotion process and they should be neglected. The meta tags that are still relevant are:

• Title  –  a title tag showing the main title that will appear in the search engine. It is recommended to include a title of up to 65 characters at most. It is important to check that it is not cut off in the mobile display due to its length.
• Description  –  the description tag that shows up to 160 characters that make up a sentence or half a sentence that appears under your title in your snippet in Google search results.
• Keywords –  keywords tag. This tag does not appear in search results or anywhere else except our site code. This tag is intended for the search engines only to alert them to the key phrases for that page. Google no longer attaches much importance to this tag, but the other search engines still do, but it is usually still advisable to update it, but it is not mandatory.

How to use meta tags for promotion purposes?

There are also other tags but these are the most important. In terms of their suitability for SEO needs, it is important to first understand that if you do not update them manually, Google will choose the title and description from the content, and these will not always serve you faithfully. Therefore it is recommended to update them manually. 

Also, there are some basic assumptions that you should work according to:

First, you should combine the key phrase for that page in both the title and the description tag. In the description tag, you can also add different formulations of the key phrase if it is possible. 

Second, remember that the main purpose of these tags is to get the surfer to click on your site over the competition. Both because it brings surfers to the site (and that’s why we gathered) and because it increases your CTR, which in turn sends another positive signal to Google. Therefore, address him in the appropriate language and create some kind of temptation that will encourage him to click.

Just make sure that the tags are the appropriate length and will not be cut off in the browser or the mobile view, which is smaller, because Google will ignore anything that exceeds the character limit and your message will not go through.

Rich content

One of the ways to improve the user experience on your website as well as to “flatter” to Google a little is to enrich the content on your website. The intention is to add additional content that is not necessarily text and can enrich the content displayed on the site. 

For example: images, infographics, videos, audio files, presentations, PDF books and more. There are many ways to do this, although Google and the other search engines do not scan the images and videos themselves but the tags associated with them, once Google finds that you have enriched your site with additional types of content to improve the experience of using your site, it will undoubtedly earn you points.

Beyond Google, your surfers will also enjoy the site and its content more, which will encourage them to be more involved. This can be reflected in repeated visits to the website, sharing on social networks, signing up for your newsletter and more. 

More types of feature rich

As we have already mentioned many times – the texts are not the only content uploaded to your website and you should use other types of content to “enrich” the shared content on the website. Google also appreciates it more, but it is important to remember to optimize with suitable tags for these contents so that Google can recognize them and what they are talking about. Here are some types of content that are recommended to be included on your website, or at least some of them:

• Videos
• Photos
• Infographics
• audio files
• presentations

How can enriching the content on the website help promote the website and the user experience?

Google works according to the basic assumption that the surfer is in the center and therefore wants to show surfers the best and most relevant results. According to many studies that have been done, most people are visual (ie have visual intelligence as their main intelligence) and therefore images, videos or any type of file that incorporates something visual can contribute to surfers.

Rich content improves the user experience and makes surfers happy, which in turn sends positive signals to Google and encourages it to give more credit to your website. Additional content such as forums, tools and calculators of various kinds can also contribute to improving engagement. Therefore, you should also add these types of content to your website if it is possible.

The speed of your website

One of the most important issues for the experience of using your website is the issue of website loading speed and browsing speed. The faster the site will be, the more convenient and pleasant it will be to browse it and move between the pages of the site. 

A site that will make us “suffer” when we browse it will make us simply leave the site, which will harm various indicators that affect the organic promotion of the site and also regardless of this – lose potential customers who leave our site nervous, probably on their way to the sites of our competitors.

There are many ways to improve the loading speed of the site and we will touch on some of them immediately. It is important to remember that the mobile browsing speed is separate from the browsing speed in the browser, so it is useful to treat both parameters at the same time and improve their performance.

The advantages of a fast website:

• A positive impression  – Whether it is the surfer’s first visit to your site or whether it is a repeat visitor, a fast website conveys professionalism and indicates that the business cares about its customers and invests the maximum in all their points of contact with the brand. This helps build and strengthen the company’s image.
• High involvement of the surfers on the website  – A fast website allows surfers to enjoy faster and smoother surfing on your website, including fast browsing between the website pages, searching for content/products and making a purchase.
• Google loves fast websites  – Beyond the fact that Google explicitly stated that website speed is one of the most important parameters in the algorithm, a website with a slow loading speed may cause surfers to leave it quickly, which will cause an increase in the percentage of abandonment on the website and a decrease in the time spent on it. These indicators are two of the most important indicators in Google’s eyes for examining the user experience on the website and it is important to take them into account.

How to check the loading speed of our website?

There are a variety of tools for testing site speed and performance:  Google’s official tool ,  GTMetrix  and Pingdon . All you have to do is enter your URL and wait for the results. The operation may take half a minute – a minute and sometimes a little more, so be patient.

At the end of the scan, you will be able to see its results divided over various parameters: full loading speed of the site, initial loading speed and more. You can examine the problematic points and the recommendations for improvement offered to you.

How to improve the loading speed of the site?

There are many factors that affect the performance of your website. Depending on the platform on which the website is built, you can control some or all of these factors. If the speed tests in the various tools did not yield satisfactory results, here are the best practices that should be implemented on the site:

• Store the site on a quality and stable server
• Use a CDN
• Make use of the cache (there are  several great plugins  for this)
• Optimize the images on the site and reduce their weight (recommended to read more  here )
• Remove unused CSS, JS and lines of code
• use Lazy Load (loading media only when the surfer reaches it without delaying the entire page loading in advance)
• make use of a necessary minimum of plugins (every plugin tends to add lines of code that burden the site)

Conversion ratios and index improvement

The conversion ratio  is a ratio between two parameters that we look at to check our results and performance in the field. Conversion ratios can be examined in different categories, for example:

• The ratio between the amount of surfers on the site and the amount of sales that day.
• The ratio between the number of people who were exposed to our result on Google versus the number of people who actually clicked on our snippet and entered the website.
• Some of the people who entered the site played a certain video.

Improving the conversion rate on the website can be influenced by countless metrics related to our website. Many of the same metrics also overlap with improving the user experience on the website and the organic promotion of our website, so it is very important to do this work ahead of time as well as use different tools to analyze the data and generate reports to track performance improvement over time.

Which conversion ratios are most important for us to measure in the context of organic promotion?

There is no uniform answer to this question. Most business owners investing in organic promotion are interested in improving some types of conversion ratios. The coefficient can be mainly interested in the conversion ratio between the number of exposures of your snippet in Google compared to the number of actual visitors to the site. 

The customer is interested in everything – the results in the end. That is, how many people entered the website and of those how many orders were there today. The more you make sure to build your marketing funnel in a smarter way, the more you can make improvements to other parts of the filter. for example:

• How many people were exposed to your ad.
• Some of them entered the site.
• Some of them left details on the website/contacted for more details.
• Some of them ordered.
• Some of them filled out feedback about the service/product.
• Some of them made a repeat purchase on the site.
• Some of them recommended the product and/or signed up for our affiliate program.

6.2. Actions we can take to improve conversion rates on the site

Well there are lots of actions you can take to improve conversion rates on your website. These will be according to the step in the filter you want to test. If, for example, you take into account the conversion ratio between those who are exposed to your snippet on Google and the people who actually click on it and come to your website – then in order to improve the conversion ratio here you will have to improve your meta tags (the title and description tags) or provide richer results in some cases (for example on product pages).

If the improvement in the conversion ratio is between people who visited the page of a certain product and people who actually purchased it – then you can go to the product page and check where the problem is and even ask friends: ask them to go to the product page and provide you with an objective opinion as consumers. Sometimes the pictures won’t be clear, sometimes the customer will lack technical information about the product, sometimes customers won’t order because it’s simply not clear to them if the offer is valid for this specific one, etc.

To improve the conversion ratio between website visitors and people who leave details, for example, you can provide more options for contacting you. There are people who do not want to receive telephone support and therefore prefer to send a message in the chat on the website or even via WhatsApp or email. There are also those who would prefer to leave you details and for you to return to them. It may be that on the page they are on, they are also having trouble finding the area for contacting you, etc.

7. Improving the user experience on the website

User experience is an old term in  the glossary of web promotion  and digital marketing, but it has gained a wider meaning only in recent years. While Google tries to improve the search engine all the time so that it presents the best, most relevant and high-quality results to its surfers – we need to constantly make the adjustments that Google wants so that it presents our sites at the top of the search results.

Google talks all the time about building websites and their content for surfers. That is, to increase the value for surfers and in exchange for that, many indicators related to this will improve and Google will reward us accordingly. After all, Google wants to show good results to surfers – so if we are considered a good, relevant, unique and high-quality website, Google will show us at the top of the search results.

Improving the user experience on the website can cover a wide range of topics, from the speed of browsing the website, through the adaptation of the website to mobile, to the content displayed on the website or even the order form for a product on the website. Here are some of the important topics in the field of user experience on the website:

• Edit the content on the website in a language that the surfer will understand  – writing at a high level or at the other end of it – at the level of children in kindergarten – is not suitable for a business website. The average surfer also has average Hebrew, so you have to speak to him at eye level. Not in a condescending way, and on the other hand, not to broadcast amateurism either. Also, you don’t want to assume that your audience understands exactly what you want from them. For example, on the payment page, when you ask for the credit card’s verification digits (the ones that appear on the back of the credit) to attach a small picture or a link to a drop-down picture with an explanation of where these are on the card.
• Check that the site is responsively adapted  – since half of internet surfers today do it via mobile, if you don’t adapt the site for mobile browsing and in general for browsing on different screens (tablets, mobiles, phones of different sizes, etc.) then you can lose many customers. If they are not comfortable browsing and reading the site, they will run away from it very quickly and find what they are looking for with your competitors. The responsive adjustment is done by a professional programmer of course. To check how your website looks on mobile you can use different tools or simply enter the website via mobile and check more easily.
• Make sure that from the very first moment the surfer knows where he is and will get what he needs  – if you promised the surfers something in the meta title (the title they read in the snippet of the Google search result) and make sure they get what they wanted on the page they entered. Many website owners try to “fish” the so-called surfers from Google to their site with blown titles that promise things and when they get to the site the surfers are disappointed to find out that they were scammed or worked on. A surfer who is angry with you is not a surfer who will want to buy from you, follow you or build a relationship with you.
• Do not overload with advertisements or add advertisements that block the content  – make good use of the white space on the site, organize the content according to areas but do not overload the surfer who comes to the site. A very large amount of content, advertisements or animations that move in front of his eyes may drive him away.
• Call to action  – use a call to action on every page of the site. Navigate the surfers from place to place. There are surfers who prefer to be prompted to take action and lead their way through the site, and there are those for whom prompting to action helps push them to know what needs to be done next. Also, prompting to action of various kinds, such as a recommendation to read more content on the site, can help surfers read more content on the site, increase the time spent on the site, reduce the abandonment rate, and the more the surfer reads more content on the site and likes this content, the more he will connect with us and the more likely he will buy from us
• Respond to your users  – if you want to improve the user experience on the site, then one of the best ways to do this is by responding back to your users. You ask the users to respond to you in the forum attached to the site or as comments under your articles on the site – but if you want them to really enjoy their experience on the site, then receiving a repeated response from you will significantly improve your feeling and even push them to respond more and more on the site.

Optimization for website images

Almost every site has pictures and on sites that don’t have pictures or other content besides text – you should add pictures. Apart from the fact that it enriches the website’s display and the content served to customers on the website, they can also add to the improvement of conversion ratios on the website, to overflowing emotions in the surfers, and more.

Even in various studies done on social networks, more reaction rates and shares were observed for posts that include an image (than posts that only include text). The point is that Google doesn’t read images, so in order for them to understand what the image is about and its connection to the content of the page where it is displayed – they use  alt tags  and give a title to the image.

These parameters help Google to understand the image, to place it higher in the search results of Google Images and also to display the image if it is a question of rich results on Google (for example displaying product images directly in the Google search bar). 

Image optimization refers not only to the appropriate image size or image tags but also to the weight of the image and the space it occupies on your storage server and how it affects the loading speed of your website pages.

What is an alt tag, where does it appear and how to set it?

An alt tag is a tag used to describe an image on your website. This tag is defined for each image separately and it has two main roles: the first role is for people with disabilities who use different tools to read the content on the website – then they will also read the image tag and describe it.

The second role is for the search engines that can’t yet scan and understand what the image is about so they figure it out from its description. The alt tag can be edited in the html file of the page where the image appears and/or by editing the image in the content management system you use, which will usually include such a built-in option.

What other things should be defined in the picture?

There are a few other things that should be included and described in the picture. First, the name of the image file on your computer, before it is uploaded to your website, you should replace it with an English name or an English phrase with dashes – such between words. File names in Hebrew can make a mess later on and are not recommended in any case.

Know that Google also knows how to translate words and phrases from English to Hebrew in order to understand the context between the meaning of the image and the content so you don’t have a problem. In addition, it is recommended to also give a meta title to the image, i.e. a title, which will be different from its alt tag and best describe what is happening in the image.

How to reduce the weight of the images with as little damage to the image resolution as possible?

A recommended image weight will usually be in the 50 to 80 KB area. As soon as it significantly exceeds this weight (let’s say to the 120 KB area and above), you should perform various actions to reduce the image weight with as little damage to its quality as possible.

The more images there are on your site and the more they weigh – it takes up storage space on your server. If your storage space is full, the website may crash and damage your reputation, cause you to lose a large audience and may even harm your promotion in Google if it remains offline for a long enough time without you noticing it. 

Also, even when there is load and the site is working, its loading speed will be very slow. In addition, the images usually weigh the most among the shared content on the site, so a certain page that has a lot of images may result in a slow server response time and slow loading speed and harm the user experience on the site.

To reduce the weight of the images on the site, you can reduce the size of the image using tools such as Photoshop and others (there are also free tools on the Internet that allow you to do this). You can convert the image to JPG or JPEG format which relatively preserves the quality of the image and reduces its weight.

In images in a reduced view on some websites, it is better to include small images with a low weight and not to use the large images by default, which will increase the weight of the images on the website. Click here  to read about our 4 recommended plugins to improve the performance of images on WordPress sites.

Internal links

Links in general are a very important part of the work of organic promotion, but many tend to attach importance to the links that enter the site (those that come from around the web and link to our site) and do not properly treat the internal links on the site.

It is a relatively simple job (but still one that needs to be done correctly) that when you learn to do it the right way, it can only take a few minutes a month and yet its meaning is great. We have already come across several clients who just inserted internal links on their site to other pages on the site and within a few days we have already seen significant improvements in the rankings of some of the site’s promoted key phrases.

Bottom line, don’t underestimate the value of internal links. Be sure to do the job smartly to avoid unnecessary spam or over-optimization that can do the opposite.

How to build internal links within our site?

Internal links on our site help surfers and promotion in several parameters: they help surfers find their way around the site. They transfer power to other internal columns. They allow us to strengthen more specific pages on the site that we feel need strengthening and in addition to everything internal links help in making the best use of the crawling budget of the Google crawlers with us.

To link the pages of the site in a professional way, you need to differentiate between the links in the menus and the links that come out of the text inside the pages. First you will need to build a proper hierarchy of content on the site. Once you have a strategy you will have a more complete picture of the pages you want to strengthen. Now, you can enter any of the articles you uploaded to the blog, for example, and link to another page on the website. 

A professional and correct method of doing this when it comes to a site with a lot of content is to search Google with the command site: all the pages on our site that are promoted for a certain phrase that we want to promote. For example, if we have a page on our website that we want to promote on the subject of “gifts for the holidays” then we will perform a search on Google: gifts for the holidays Site:www.yourwebsite.co.il and Google will now show us all the promoted pages on our website for the phrase gifts for the holidays.

Besides the result related to the page itself that we want to promote, we can enter the other results, enter their editing in the back office of the website and from a relevant text anchor (that is, from the key phrase from which we want to extract a link) we will link to the page we want to promote and strengthen it.

What is the right mix of internal link building?

The right mix of link building is real work. The content hierarchy on the site as well as many other parameters should be taken into account. We also want the links to look as natural as possible, so it is impossible for all the links to the same page to link from the same phrase, even if it is the main key phrase of the same article. 

Sometimes you have to relate in a different wording of it, sometimes from a complete sentence, etc. For example, if you clear the phrase “gifts for the holidays” that we talked about, then sometimes we will also link from the phrase “gift for the holidays”, or “gifts for the family”, or “to read a guide on how to choose gifts for the holidays, click here”, etc.

Also, it is impossible to remove 20-30 links from each page of your website because this would both be considered spam and reduce the juice of the links, i.e. their power. And so this also needs to be done correctly when the goal is usually to strengthen more main pages on the site or those that promote important key phrases or pages that we feel need strengthening.

Adjusting the website for mobile browsing

Half of internet surfers do so via mobile. If you have ever entered a website that is not optimized for mobile and see how the screen and content are cut before your eyes and how uncomfortable it is to browse, read and navigate, you understand what we are talking about.

Not only you actually, but all those people who encounter such a case will immediately leave the site and go to a competitor’s site. Responsive adjustment of the site is the professional name for adjusting the site for browsing on screens of different sizes. That is, it can fit smartphones with screens of different sizes, for mobile, stationary or tablet browsing.

All of these have screens of different sizes, while an adapted website will be accessible to all types of screens with maximum efficiency, which will significantly improve the experience of using the website, while keeping more than half of the internet users who will continue browsing your website and will not run away from it once they have entered.

How to adapt the website for mobile browsing?

The adaptation work for mobile browsing will be done by a professional programmer, of course. Most of the work will be done using code, so it is also important to ask the programmer not to leave behind useless CSS code residues that can slow down the site’s loading speed. Important points that you want to refer to in adapting your site for mobile is the header area when entering the home page and in general to different pages on the site. 

Since the display area on a mobile is more limited than on a computer, this precious real estate space on the surfer’s phone screen should also include the requested content and as much of it as possible. Also check that the font size on the mobile is large enough and easy to read. If there are plugins or pop-up windows adapted to the computer , make sure they don’t pop up on mobile or block content.

If you have banners or advertisements on the site – check that they do not block content in mobile browsing as well. Responsive adaptation of the site is adaptation of the structure, design and content of the site to screens of different sizes. That’s why it’s important to ask the programmer to make the necessary adjustments for additional screen resolutions along the way, even if it costs you a few hundred shekels more for the work, it will be worth it in the long run.

Installing SEO plugins for WordPress websites

Most websites on the Internet today are based on the WordPress content management system. This system is very friendly in the eyes of Google mainly due to the readable and orderly code for Google’s crawlers but also due to the positive reputation of the system and its websites. Among the multitude of advantages of the WordPress system there is another and no less significant advantage and that is the plugin area.

The system has between tens and hundreds of thousands of different plugins for countless topics that should help improve the display of the site, the behavior of the surfers, improving the speed of the site, auxiliary plugins for promotion, security plugins, anti-spam plugins and more. You should know at least a few important plugins that, in addition to improving the user experience on your website, can also help you with organic promotion:

• Yoast SEO  – a great SEO plugin for WordPress whose free version is also very useful. Besides the fact that he will help you optimize and adjust the content on the website for the purpose of promotion, he will also be able to help you prepare a site map and more.
• WP Rocket  – a great premium plugin that helps improve browsing and loading speed on the site on several levels. The add-on costs money but is definitely recommended.
• Broken Links Checker  – As you know, broken links can damage your website’s promotion. This plugin detects broken links or problematic images and allows you to fix them quickly through the plugin screen.
• Asset CleanUp: Page Speed ​​Booster  – helps to identify unnecessary code sections of plugins, design kits and other unwanted residues on the site so that you can remove them and speed up the site’s activity.
• Imagify  /  ShortPixel  /  TinyPNG  /  Smush  – all great plugins that will help reduce the weight of images on your site without compromising their quality. Most of them also offer support for displaying images in the Webp format that Google really likes and the option to display the images via a built-in CDN, which further improves site speed and user experience.

Off-Site website promotion

An organic promotion procedure is much more than the website itself. In fact, there are many parameters that need to be considered and work that needs to be done that are off-site or lead off-site and to it. For example, implementing various tools on the site and collecting data, adapting the site for browsing on different platforms and on different screens, various studies that need to be performed such as competitor research, keyword research, link research and more.

This part of the guide encompasses many parameters that are important for these categories in the promotion work and we strongly recommend not to skip it because it is the second part of the promotion work.

Keyword research

Keyword research is a research that is carried out at the beginning of the promotion work usually. Research can help us in several different ways:

1. Formulate new ideas for keywords and phrases that should be used to promote the site.
2. Filter out keywords that are too generic or competitive that will take a long time to promote and/or won’t be targeted enough for the client to bring in customers.
3. Checking the degree of competition and the estimated monthly search volume of the selected phrases to assess the traffic potential on the site and whether it is worth investing in the promotion of a certain phrase.
4. and more.

Professional keyword research can even take a good few hours and sometimes will also include competitor research and which key phrases they are promoting and to examine whether it is also worth promoting our website with them. The amount of phrases to promote depends on the budget and the promotion strategy of course.

What key phrases do we want to promote?

When we come to do keyword research and choose the relevant key phrases to promote our website we want to think objectively. That is, the business owner may decide out of emotion or lack of experience that he wants to be placed first for phrase X in the search engine.

That’s fine, but if the phrase in question is very competitive, it may take years to get to the first or top three results for it. Also, if the expression is too general (and it happens in many areas) it is possible that people are just looking for information or something else in the area that is not what you provide.

When we approach choosing a key phrase, we want to think about its relevance to the business, whether our target audience is really likely to search for it and whether it has a reasonable search volume worth investing time and resources into. That is – a phrase with 0-10 searches per month will not necessarily be worth your effort to work on it for a few months in what in the end will not necessarily generate profits.

Another thing you might want to consider is targeting. The longer or more specific the phrase is, the more likely it is to quickly appear in the first results and the competition will be lower.

How many expressions do we want to promote?

The answer to this depends entirely on the client’s budget. There are tourism companies, mortgages, banks, credit companies and companies in other fields that invest in the promotion of dozens of phrases every month, but their budget allows it. 

A small-medium business will usually invest in the promotion of 10-15 phrases on average and smaller businesses will even invest in fewer phrases. Promoting more expressions can contribute on the following levels:

• Greater volume of potential traffic to reach the site. Each phrase has a certain search volume – therefore increasing the first results to more phrases equals more traffic to the site.
• More traffic to the website in relation to a good conversion rate means more revenue for the business.
• More promoted phrases in the first results is a higher reputation of the business over the competitors, both in the eyes of the competitors and in the eyes of the surfers.
• Arrival of a larger and more diverse target audience that can search for expressions in different versions or different products under the same category (for example, a store website for the sale of sports equipment. There are thousands of types of sports products. The website can promote specific categories or products. The earlier it is on more specific products in the results In Google this way he will earn more traffic and more customers).

The thing with more promotion phrases is the amount of work the promotion job requires. If your budget is limited – it is better to invest more work in fewer phrases but in phrases with a good search volume than to spread over a crazy amount of phrases, shoot arrows in all directions, but invest little resources in working on each phrase due to the low budget. Consult your promotion company regarding the amount of phrases and the type of phrases recommended for promotion for your business.

What tools are recommended for keyword research?

In our opinion, the most recommended tool for keyword research is the Google Keyword Tool. This tool shows in the most accurate way the estimation of traffic and competition in Google (since it is their search engine) for certain phrases. It also offers a wide variety of related phrases that you should think about for promotion purposes.

The research process can be expanded using additional tools (some of which are completely or partially free, and some of which are paid) that will help you find long-tail phrases as well:  UbberSuggest ,  KeywordTool  and KWFinder .

Building links to the site

Building links to the site is perhaps the most important part of the organic promotion process (but it alone will not be enough to do a good promotion job, certainly not in competitive fields). Unlike before, today the quality of the links has a greater meaning than the quantity of links, therefore it is important to build connections and cooperation and find where it is worthwhile to link to our site, get new ideas, cultivate support sites and more.

Building links to the website should be done in the right quantities, in the right way, with the right mix of the types of links and anchors and more. As you become more professional in the field of promotion, you will have to get to know the different types of links, examine their potential quality, where you should get links from and where not, which links can be harmful and which links can be useful and more. You can also use various tools to research links leading to the websites of your main competitors and thus get more ideas from where to link to your website. 

How to check which links will be good for our site?

Link quality is more important than a large amount of poor quality links. This does not mean that you will have to pursue only super quality links because that would be very expensive and unnatural in the eyes of Google, but it is important not to include spam links in your link building and also to combine as many quality links as possible alongside less quality links for the sake of diversity (a little about the link mix later).

To check the quality of your links and including more information about the sites linking to you, you can use two great tools that we highly recommend: Ahrefs and Majestic SEO. Both of these tools are premium tools that cost a monthly subscription fee, but every professional promoter should use at least one of them.

You can check whether the links pointing to your site are follow or no-follow. You can check from which phrases (anchor text) the links refer to you. You can get from those tools their quality score regarding the quality of the links and this is the important measure that you will also want to look at to examine the quality of the links. The link quality equipment in Ahrefs is called Domain Rating and in Majestic it is called Trust Flow.

How to check competitors’ links and get more ideas from where to link?

In direct continuation of the previous paragraph. We can use Ahrefs to track the backlinks to our competitors’ sites and the quality of the links. This way we can find additional sources that are worth linking to our site and also find sources for better quality links.

Also, assume that if you link to yourself from where your competitors link, but you also link from other sources, this can give you an additional advantage over your competitors.

Where can we get links to our site?

• Link exchange  – there are several types of link exchanges, but they are not always the best option. Google gives less power to sites that link to each other, so today, apart from this option, there is a cooperation that promoters or website owners do to exchange links, including third-party sites. That is, you will link to site X from your site Y and I will link to your site Y from my site Z.
• Support sites  – every professional web promoter currently takes care of the infrastructure of support sites in various fields. Some are portals in different fields and others are specific niche sites. There are promoters with dozens of such sites and there are large promotion companies that maintain hundreds of such sites. Your ongoing maintenance is far beyond your domain and storage costs because you also need to generate links to them and generate content for these sites. The higher the quality of the sites themselves, the higher the quality and the better the links from them.
• Buying links  – you can pay website owners or advertising/promotion companies that own a large amount of support websites, magazines and such good websites and pay them for publishing articles with links to your websites. This way you can save the whole thing of cooperation and just pay for the links.
• Indexes  – there are spammy indexes but there are really good indexes that are worth subscribing to. Register with a profile full of information and not just a link to the website, this is so that the page from which the link originates will be a better quality page. There are also various recommendation sites that include recommended professionals in various fields. You should also register there.
• Article sites  – it is recommended to upload articles to leading article sites and link from them to your site.
• Social networks  – it is recommended to open business pages or business profiles on social networks and link from them to your website.
• PR articles  – longer and higher quality articles that you can publish for a fee on major and leading websites.

The importance of building links in an intelligent way with the right mix

A correct mix of links is a correct regulation of the amount of links, with the correct frequency and from the correct anchors during the month. A significant part of the promotion process is to initiate links yourself, but on paper Google doesn’t really like it.

Most of the promoters in the world initiate the links themselves and Google won’t do anything about it either, because that’s how the internet works, that’s how everyone works and there is no other way that bypasses the meaning of links from around the web as a way to build the authority of a certain website. A correct mix of links will first include a logical distribution of links. That is, scattering at a reasonable frequency.

If you don’t link to a site for a whole month and suddenly one day of the month you put 30 links in it at once it is unnatural and illogical. Also, if your site has almost no hits in its first months and you link to it 300 links a month, this also doesn’t make sense (again, because Google is looking for naturalness). Apart from the monthly frequency of links, it is also worth considering the quality of the links.

There are higher quality links and there are less. Naturally, a site that will receive many shares and recommendations throughout the network from surfers and different people who will recommend the site – this means that the links will be partly of higher quality and partly of lesser quality. Therefore, a site that receives only very high quality links but no links with less value – this is also unnatural and will turn on a red light for Google.

The last thing we would like to talk about in the context of the mix of links is the text from which the link originates – or in professional parlance, anchor text . If you initiate links to promote your website and you want it to look natural, make sure that the links are varied. For example: if you want to promote a page on your website on the topic of SEO, then some of the phrases you will call from will be SEO, some will be organic promotion, some will be SEO, etc.

It is also recommended to combine links from a longer line/phrase. It is recommended to integrate links from your business name and sometimes it is recommended to share the links directly without anchor text – that is, directly your website address.

Use of analytics tools

Analytics tools are an integral part of the promotion work. Without them we are practically blind in everything related to the real activity on our site. Without these tools, we have no way to check how many surfers entered our website, where they visited, from which page they left the website, how long they stayed on the website, at what time the majority of surfers were there and much more information that we can collect through the use of various analytics tools.

The most recommended tools in this area will of course be  Google Analytics  and Search Console . Both are Google tools and present very accurate and extensive information. There are also alternatives such as Yandex Metrica which knows how to produce more comprehensive information such as heat maps and thus provide additional insights into the behavior of the users on the website and potential problems that may exist in the user interface.

What data can we get in Google Analytics and Google Search Console?

These two free tools from Google will provide you with a lot of information and important tools for carrying out your promotion work and in general for monitoring your website, the movement of its surfers and their behavior and more. If you have a free Gmail account you can use these tools as well. You can connect these tools to other tools and of course connect the two tools themselves to synchronize data. 

These tools will allow us to find a lot of information such as the number of users entering the site by times, hours, days and dates. Like the pages viewed on the website, average amount of views per visit, average stay times per visit to the website, conversion rates, abandonment percentages, volume of sales and more.

You can also send a sitemap and Robots.txt file to Google directly and save the waiting time for an independent Google scan. In other words, these are mandatory tools for every promoter and every business owner in general.

Checking locations and producing reports

Every promoter ultimately aims to improve the site’s position in the search results, therefore tracking the site’s ranking for the promoted key phrases is one of the attractive parts of the promotion work. For the clients, it is often about the “bottom line” of your work and why they pay you money.

Therefore, seeing the site you are promoting significantly improve in results from month to month will be something you definitely want to wish for and it will also be in some way a kind of stamp on the level of your work. There are many different tools you can use to check the ratings, gather additional information, and generate reports. Some are tools designed for this job only and some are All In One tools. Try checking  Accuranker ,  Rank Ranger  or  the Israeli Zepo  .

In conclusion

that’s it! Give yourself a nice pat on the back for making it this far. Now you have all the initial and most significant knowledge that is required to promote websites organically. We recommend starting and experimenting with everything you have just learned and while moving to use the additional guides on our website in order to expand on the various points mentioned in this guide. 

If you do not feel completely confident to implement the things in the field, we will be happy to help you and deliver organized SEO trainings to you or your organization in order to help build correct and efficient work processes.