Working with a small business, and taking part in many SEO communities, such as SEOmoz, for example, I meet many SEO myths and misconceptions, which is called first-hand.

All these stories are as different as the people who work in SEO , the funny thing about this is that they have one characteristic feature: everyone looks at the details without considering the problem as a whole .

Most SEO problems are precisely because of such a “narrow” view of the root causes of a problem, no matter what it concerns - or it is related to page indexing, or ranking, or link building, and so on, the list can be long continue.

Moreover, I would even say that 80% of all SEO problems are due to the fact that optimizers are concentrating heavily on details, not seeing the picture as a whole .

So, in this post I want to go back to the basics - I hope it will be useful not only for beginners, but also help experienced specialists to take a different look at some of the problems.

For effective SEO, we need to take the whole picture, I call it “ Picture 4" P ": Robots, Ranking, Relevance and Results . "

For each of these 4 "P", I wrote a short description and gave some tips on how to measure your success in this area.

Robots

Lottery advertising on television says: " He who does not play does not win ."

We will say differently, you will never win a game called SEO unless your site is indexed by search engines.

How do you do this?

You can go to Silicon Valley and personally ask Google to index your site (or to the office on the Scooter, which is much closer, but the result with Yandex will be similar), but it’s irrational, you can simply create a good structure of your site so that the robot can easily navigate from one page to another, but in order for it to find your website make many relevant inbound links, high quoting in social networks ...

Tips and Tools:

• Check your site indexed in Google through a search operator: site: site address .
• Test your site for the ease of the search robot using the tools: Crawl Test and Xenu's Link Sleuth.
• Register with webmasters tools: Yandex, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
• Create an effective XML sitemap.
• Understand that indexing is not all or nothing.

Ranging

Naturally ranking is the most important thing in SEO - everyone wants to be in the first place in the search results. But I did not get hung up on positions for the whole year.

Not at all because they are not important to me, rather the opposite. After all, high positions attract traffic to the site. My opinion, like the main idea of ​​this post, the position in the SERP is only a detail of one big picture , although not a small and very important detail.

Tips and Tools:

• Log out of Google and disable personalization options to check your positions.
• Regularly monitor positions.
• Use information with Webmaster Tools.

Relevance

Naturally, from high positions there is a sense only when they attract the relevant traffic to your website; by the word "relevant" I mean not just the "interested" traffic, but the one that buys your product or uses the services that you provide.

A lot of my clients want to get high positions, for keywords that, in their opinion, are popular. But here they face two problems:

• What they consider popular is not always popular.
• What is popular is not always relevant, or difficult to convert.

Tips and Tools:

• Predict the amount of traffic with Google’s special keyword-selection tool (http://www.google.com/sktool - whoever doesn’t use this tool loses a lot, and I would recommend LiveInternet for the RuNet of the most accessible tools, although There are other ways to estimate traffic).
• Use analytics tools (Google Analytics or Web-Visor) to track organic traffic from a search engine and by what keywords users came, etc.
• Conduct a small advertising campaign in context to explore the possibilities and volumes for further promotion.

results

OK, I myself understand that “results” is a rather vague concept, but in the end I need one more word in “P”. Seriously, I mean the end result - customers, purchases and everything else in which you measure the success of your business ("conversion", if to speak in professional terminology).

Traffic is only valuable when it brings some measurable result - otherwise it is a waste of your money.

Tips and Tools:

• Customize your analytics to track conversions and goals.
• Track the behavior of visitors on your site - this way you can quickly achieve your goals.
• Segment, segment, and segment again.

Naturally, thousands of articles and blog posts are devoted to these four “Ps”, we are all better than others, but if you see the big picture, you don’t have a “narrow” view of the problem, limiting yourself to measuring success by 1 or 2 indicators then you are on the right path to becoming a true SEO professional.