Google's algorithm is extremely complex, and here are the basic principles it uses to rank websites:

Google looks for pages that contain quality and relevant information about the user's query.

It determines relevancy by "scanning" your site's content and evaluating (using algorithms) whether that content matches what the user is looking for, typically based on the keywords it contains.

Google defines the "quality" of a site in many different ways, but it's still important to Google the quantity and quality of other websites that link to your page and to your site as a whole.

Search engine algorithms are constantly updated, and every year it becomes more and more difficult to get to the top of the results and keep your positions there. And many cheap and easy ways to improve your rankings have become extremely risky and face sanctions from search engines.

So what works? How do Google and Yandex determine which pages to return in response to what people are looking for? How to get all this valuable traffic to your website?

Involvement. Search systems, especially Google, pay more and more attention to the indicators of involvement and user experience. You can positively affect these indicators by making sure that your content responds to the user's request, it (content) is really useful, interesting and you can interact with it. Make sure that the pages are loaded quickly and do not contain unnecessary design elements or, for example, overly aggressive advertising over content.

“Sharability” or “Possibility of joint use”, i.e. The ability to share this specific content on social networks.

ALT attributes

The way you mark your images can affect not only how search engines perceive your page, but also on the volume of search traffic generated by the search for images on the site.

The ALT attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for the image if the user cannot view it. Your images may break over time (files are deleted, users cannot connect to the site, etc.), so the useful description of the image can be important in terms of ease of use in general. It also gives you another opportunity - in addition to content - to help search engines understand what the page is about.

It is not necessary to “fill” Alt with key words. It is enough not to miss him and try to give a complete and accurate description of the image (imagine that you describe it to someone who does not see it-that’s why the alt attribute really needs!). You can read more about the attributes of ATL and Title for pictures in the Google Help.

Of course, in addition to meta-description (Title and Description), the actual content of the page is important. Different pages serve as various goals.

Google and Yandex more and more prefer certain types of content, and when creating any of the pages of their site, you should remember several things:

Volumetric and unique content. There is no magical number from the point of view of the number of words, and if you have several pages of content on your site with several hundred words, you will not lose the favor of search engines. But more often, a longer unique content is preferred.

If you have a large number of very short (50-200 words) pages or many duplicated content, where nothing changes, except for the Title page, this can negatively affect the positions of the site. Look at your site as a whole: a large percentage of your pages is “skinny”, duplicated and low -cost or unquenced? If so, try to find a way to “make” these pages with better content. Check your analytics to see how much traffic these pages receive, and just exclude them (using the NOindex metatheg) from the search results so that it does not seem to search engines that you are trying to fill their index with many low -value pages, trying to increase their rating.

Finding low -value and low -quality pages on the site will help a tool for webmasters. For example, Google will help to find such pages through indexing, then the pages in the search, here we select the excluded pages, in the filter the status we select the necessary parameters, in our case - a low -value or unquenced page.