search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (Eng. Search engine optimization, SEO) - a set of measures for internal and external optimization to increase the position of the site in the results of search engines for specific user requests, in order to increase

network traffic (for information resources) and potential customers (for commercial resources) and subsequent monetization (revenue) of this traffic. SEO can be targeted at various types of searches, including image search, video search, news search and industry specific search engines.

Usually, the higher the site’s position in search results, the more interested visitors go to it from search engines. When analyzing the effectiveness of search engine optimization, the cost of the target visitor is estimated taking into account the time the site took to the indicated positions and site conversions.

Search engines take into account many internal and external parameters of a site when calculating its relevance (degree of compliance with an entered query):

keyword density (sophisticated algorithms of modern search engines allow semantic analysis of the text to filter out search spam in which the keyword is found too often (term. slang "nausea");

site citation index ("CI"), depending on the number and credibility of web resources that link to this site; many search engines do not take into account reciprocal links (to each other). An example of a metric is PageRank;

the water content of the text is an indicator that determines the presence of insignificant words that do not carry any useful information and serve to dilute the text (stop words);

behavioral factors (internal) - a number of all kinds of user actions that they can perform on the site: logging in, the total time spent by the user on the site, the number of sessions of one user on the site, browsing, the number of pages viewed by the user, returning the user to the site, clicks on links in the text, clicks on links in the menu;

behavioral factors (external) - the main external indicator of the quality of user behavior when interacting with the site is the refusal to further search for a key phrase in a search engine;

site quality index ("ICS") is an indicator of how useful a particular site is for users from the point of view of Yandex. IKS was introduced in 2018 instead of the thematic citation index (TIC), taking into account the topics of referring sites.

All factors affecting the position of the site in the search engine results can be divided into external and internal. Internal optimization (relating solely to the internal system of the site) includes work aimed at the general improvement of the quality of the site, the benefits it brings to the visitor. These include work on the structure of the project, on facilitating the perception of content and directly on the quality of this content. The value of the total number of such factors in most sources varies around 200. A functional approach to search engine optimization aimed at fitting certain factors to their target values has become a thing of the past due to the complexity of search engine algorithms - the cost of “balancing” dozens of factors exceeds the cost of creating originally a quality resource.