All search engines, including Yandex, tell you to create great content. They also tell you that the content should be unique. But what if your content gets re-posted somewhere, and what if that copy-paster ranks higher than you? This situation, I am sure, is familiar to most of us.

Search engines have been pretty good at determining the primary source of content, but sometimes they do get it wrong, and Yandex does more often than Google.

In 2011 Google came up with a way for authors to protect their rights in the SERPs with rel=”author” tag. It has proven to be a very good way to show Google the true ownership of the content as well as build up authority of you as a writer. Unfortunately, Yandex does not support rel=”author” tag. But there is an alternative.

Original Texts tool in Yandex Webmaster

Yandex gives a possibility to claim your content authorship by submitting the texts through a form in Yandex Webmaster tools before publishing them on the site.

The form is placed in Site content section in Webmaster Tools. The section is not translated into English for some reason, but the Original Texts tool can still be accessed from the first item in the list or by following this link http://webmaster.yandex.ru/site/ext_plugins.xml?wizard=api.originals.

In order for the tool to work for you, you need to make sure:

- Your site has a TIC of 10 or higher.

- You content is not shorter than 2000 characters and not longer than 32ooo characters.

- Your content is unique and cannot be found anywhere on the Internet.

- You submit plain text without HTML code.

Although Original Texts tool does not give a 100% guarantee that copied text will not over-rank your original one, in most case it will help Yandex to identify you as an author of the content.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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For a while I’ve been wondering, and I guess some of you did too, if there is a good competitive intelligence tool for Yandex? Recently I found one, which works well, and I would like to share my findings with you. The tool is called SpyWords.

I used it a lot in the last couple of month, and since it did a good job and saved a lot of time for me, I thought I give them a credit and review them on my blog.

Features

To start with, SpyWords is very similar (but simpler) to SEMRush, which is a well-known competitive intelligence tool for Google and Bing.

Basically, SpyWords has three main features that can be used for various purposes. The interface is very straightforward, and although the tool does not have as many reporting options as SEMRush, it can provide useful insights into verticals, SEO and SEM competitors, and be a great help in researching keywords.

Competitive intelligence for Yandex and Google

This feature gives an overview of a specific competitor in Yandex (paid and organic) or Google (paid and organic) as well as competitiveness of a specific keyword in Yandex and Google.

Entering keyword in the search field will give you the following information:

PPC (Yandex Direct & Google AdWords)

- Number of impressions for the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Average CPC for the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Number of advertisers bidding on the keyword in Yandex and Google

- Names of the competitors bidding on the keywords and their text ads

- Other relevant keywords that are purchased on Yandex and Google together with the keyword, their search volumes, competitiveness and average CPC

SEO (Yandex and Google)

- Top 50 domains competing for the keyword in organic search, their ranking URLs and snippets

- Total number of organic keywords each competitor ranks top 50

Analyzing one specific competitor is even more interesting. Entering a specific domain in the search field will provide you with the following insights:

PPC (Yandex Direct & Google AdWords)

- Number of keywords the competitor is buying in Yandex and Google AdWords

- Average position of competitor’s ads in Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Approximate daily budget in Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Approximate daily traffic from Yandex Direct and Google AdWords

- Keywords purchased by the competitor on Yandex and Google, ad texts, average positions, monthly impressions, competitiveness and average CPC

- All competitor’s ads in Yandex Direct and AdWords, landing page URLs and number of keywords assigned to each ad (especially relevant for Yandex direct)

- Main competitors of the analyzed domain in paid search

SEO (Yandex and Google)

- All keywords the competitor ranks for in Google and Yandex, position for each keyword, average monthly impressions, ranking URLs and snippets

- Main competitors of the analyzed domain in organic search (based on the amount of common keywords they rank for)

Domain comparison

This feature compares organic and paid search for up to 3 domains. Let’s say, for instance, we are working for Hotels.com, and trying to evaluate our competitor booking.com. Entering both domains into the search fields gives a snapshot comparison table that displays the following metrics for both domains:

- Numbers of keywords in paid search

- Average position in paid search

- Number of keywords in organic search

- Approximate daily SEM budget

- Number of paid visits per day

- Number of organic visits per day

The amount of keywords on paid and organic search can be also visualized as diagrams:

You can find out they keywords hotels.com and booking.com have / don’t have in common by clicking on the corresponding part of the diagram.

Keyword research

The last tab, the keyword tool, is mainly good for expanding ad groups and finding PPC keyword ideas with lower competition or lower CPC. Entering a keyword into the search box in the keyword tool tab will give the following information:

- Keyword suggestions

- Search volumes in Yandex and Google

- CPC for each keyword suggestions in Yandex and Google

- Numbers of competitors for each keyword suggestion in Yandex and Google

Based on the input from this tab, it is very easy to optimize the cost of PPC campaigns on AdWords and Yandex.Direct or simply find some gems to add to your keyword portfolio:

Overall, I really love SpyWords. Even though it does not have that many fancy features and reporting options, in most cases it provides you with sufficient information for making decisions. There are, of course, some highlights and lowlights, like with any tool.

Pros

- Price. The service only costs 1000 RUB (approx. 33 USD) per month.

- Very simple and intuitive interface.

- Quite reliable data.

- Saves a lot of time when analyzing verticals, competitors, or looking for keyword ideas.

Cons

- Interface is only in Russian.

- Difficult to purchase the tool from outside CIS due to limited payment options.

- When trying to open export files, the Cyrillic texts sometimes appears scrambled due to encoding issues.

Bonus tips

1. If you do not have any of the Russian e-currencies accounts or a credit card issued in CIS or any of these random countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Macedonia, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Philippines, or Montenegro, the most straightforward way to pay to purchase the tool is Yandex.Money. This payment system allows opening accounts from any part of the world.

2. If the content appears scrambled when opening the .csv export files, upload it to Google Drive and open it as a Google spreadsheet. Google is able to interpret Cyrillic symbols correctly.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with SpyWords in any way. I think the service is great and helpful for Russian SEO work, hence this post.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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All of us worked with or at least heard about rich snippets in Google. Rich snippets are great, but since implementation requires some development, a lot of however neglect them. There is always a better way to spend those precious developers’ hours, so the requests for those small pieces of code often end up being pushed in the bottom of backlogs and never makes it to the top. Does is sound familiar? Unfortunately.

When working with Yandex, there are also certain tricks to distinguish site snippet in the SERPs, and they are actually quite easy to implement. In most of cases I list in this article you won’t need developers’ help at all.

1. Title and Meta Description tags

The basis of a great snippet is of course great Title and great Meta Description tags.

The title for Yandex should not exceed 70 characters, including spaces, and contain relevant keywords. Meta Description tag can be around 150-160 characters long and should describe the page content in the best possible way.

When the tags are not written in a good way, Yandex often replaces Titles and Meta Description with snippets of text from the page, or data from DMOZ or Yandex Catalog, which is often not ideal. While there is a possibility to opt out of using DMOZ and YaCa copy, it is difficult to predict what piece of text Yandex will pick up from the page to replace a carelessly written description. In the example below, instead of a could-have-been converting text with great call to action, description contains bread crumbs (poker articles >> poker strategies >> read more) and random text strings:

2. Favicon

Favicon in the SERPs is something special for Yandex. Effective favicon can do a lot to your CTR, but being used to Google’s SERP layout, many webmasters do not take this feature into consideration. For example, compare the 3 search results for “weather in Paris” (погода в париже):

The third result without a favicon does not stand out as much as the other two.

Make sure your favicon is simple and clear, made in bright distinctive colors and stands out comparing to your SERP competitors.

3. Sitelinks

Just like Google, Yandex can display sitelinks in the SERPs. Similarly, sitelinks are generated automatically based on the importance and weight of pages.

Yandex gives webmasters more control over sitelinks for their sites than Google. Using Yandex Webmaster tools, you can remove unwanted sitelinks, and choose the anchor text for each sitelink from several variations offered by Yandex.

4. Capitalization in “display” URL

Yandex allows to change capitalization in longer domain names in order to make them more readable. For example, I could configure that russiansearchtips.com would display as RussianSearchTips.com in Yandex SERP.

Here is another example from online poker industry – both domain names use the capitalization feature:

Capitalization of domain name can be configured through Yandex Webmaster.

5. Social links

Links to social profiles in snippets is one of the newest features introduced by Yandex. In order for the links to your/ your company profiles vKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and YouTube to appear in the snippet, they have to be present on the homepage and linked via Yandex Spravochnik (analog of Google Places) / configured through Yandex Webmaster.

I covered the process for getting social links in Yandex snippets in one of my earlier posts. Please feel free to have a look!

6. Special snippets for businesses

Yandex allows business owners to add a lot of additional information about different types of companies and organizations in their snippets. For example, for a hotel website it is possible to display its star rating, number of rooms and available facilities (in the example below Hotel Beta is displaying the following information through their special snippet: 3 star hotel; 1000 rooms;  restaurant, Internet access, air conditioning and a mini bar):

Currently special snippets are available for 75 types of organizations, such as, for example, restaurants, bars, night clubs, hotels, shopping malls, petrol stations and pharmacies.

This type of snippet is only available for official sites of organizations, and cannot be used by guides or affiliates.

The information for special snippets can be submitted via Yandex Webmaster or via Yandex Spravochnik.

7. Contact information

The contact information (address and phone number) can be displayed in a snippet for an official site of almost any kind of organization, regardless if there is a support for special snippets for its type of business.

The contact information can be submitted via Yandex Webmaster or via Yandex Spravochnik.

8. Product information for retailers

For retailers Yandex can display product information and even prices right in the SERPs. In the example below the snippet displays the price of an item (iPhone 4 32GB) and area available for delivery (Moscow):

Product information in the snippets is displayed automatically for Yandex Market (analog of Google Shopping) advertizers.

For those who does not advertise on Yandex Market, it is possible to submit product information via Yandex Webmaster tools. This way is a little bit more complicated, as the product information needs to be in YML (Yandex market language), which is a special type of XML file supported by Yandex Market. Generating an YML file might require some development, but the results will pay off (especially for stores with competitive prices).

Why care about Yandex snippets?

Apart from the obvious reason that a better snippet will result in better CTR and consequently in more organic traffic, there is another important motive: Yandex gives a lot of weight to so-called “behavioral” factors in the ranking formula, and SERP click-through rate is one of them. Improving snippets and SERP CTR should be high on your agenda, because better snippets will not only bring you more visitors, but also help your site to rank better!

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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How much is too much?

The recent statement of Matt Cutts during Pubcon about the possibility of being penalized for having too many ads on the page triggered a lot of discussions among SEOs this week.

Not many know, however, that Yandex made a similar announcement just a few weeks ago.

New Yandex ranking formula

In the beginning of October Yandex incorporated “site usability” into its ranking formula. While usability is a very broad term, Yandex gives some hints that the algorithm change is mainly about ad placement on the page:

“As a first step we learned to detect if ads distract the user or add relevant information and value. The ranking formula now includes several ad-related factors. We detect if the ads prevent the user from viewing the main content, if the ads overlay the content, and if the page containing these ads still interests the user. Resources, where the ads are placed in appropriate way, often rank higher than the ones overloaded with advertizing.”

Sounds very similar to the Google’s announcement, doesn’t it?

Interestingly, shortly after the abovementioned update in Yandex ranking formula, Analyzethis.ru presented a new tool: Intrusive Ads Analyzer.

Intrusive Ads Analyzer - English Interface

The graph displays how ad heavy pages rank on average in different search engines. The numbers on the axis are not actual rankings, but rather coefficients based on analysis of pages ranking for certain search queries. The queries selected for this analysis are mainly Music, Video and Software related, which are probably the most spammy and overloaded with ads categories.

According to this tool, ad heavy sites still rank better in Yandex than in Google.

What does this mean for Yandex SEO?

This change is really nothing new. I see it as a logical development of the recent anti-spam methods introduced by Yandex search team. First they gave a lot of importance to behavioral factors, then implemented a rule against keyword stuffing. The first time Yandex expressed their negative attitude toward pop-ups and pop-unders was already back in 2009.

All they are trying to do is to give the answers that people like, which is a very high priority for them right now as their market share in Russia began to decrease.

What I feel is very likely to be important after this new algorithm change is:

• Amount and type of advertizing on the page
  I assume that pages with pop-up and pop-under ads as well as any kind of banners overlaying the text will be the most obvious candidates for a penalty. I also assume that too  many blocks of AdSense or Yandex.Direct links, especially situated above the fold, will raise a flag too.
• Behavioral factors
  Bounce rate from the page, time spent on the page, etc.
• Site load speed
  This factor was not publicly mentioned anywhere, but I believe it is be one of the basic signals when it comes to usability.
• Quality and amount of content on the page
  Unique content has been always important, and probably will be even more important now. It should not be overloaded with keywords. High keyword density will most likely hurt rand not help.
• Structure of the page
  Yandex is very likely to look at navigation links and where they point, as well as how the content is presented on each page. By this I mean the usage of headers (h1, h2, h3 etc.), tags like <p>, <br> and other ways of formating like <strong>, <i>, font size etc. The bottom line is, the text needs to be readable.

All in all, I think this is not a significant change and it does not imply that the tactics of Yandex SEO needs to be revised. This is just another reminder that websites should be made for the user, and only then optimized for search engines.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Yandex.Direct, the PPC platform of Yandex, has been around since 2001 and is the oldest system of contextual ads in Russia (Google launched AdWords in Russia in 2002). Even though it displays ads to over 22 million people every day and attracts hundreds of new advertizers from Russia and overseas, the user interface is, let’s say, not the most convenient. Managing large PPC campaigns through Yandex web interface is a challenging task. But from now on it will be much easier for all search marketers. Finally Yandex launched a desktop tool for managing Yandex.Direct accounts, similar to those of Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Please meet  Direct Commander!

The tool is available for Windows and Mac, but unfortunately the user interface is in Russia only. The first version of Commander is not as powerful as AdWords Editor, but it provides all the basic options you need for day-to-day PPC optimization. With the help of Direct Commander you can easily:

- Change campaign and ad settings (targeting, budgets, alerts, site exclusion, automated campaign management features such as Autofocus etc.)

- View statistics

- Create, edit and manage ads

- Add, remove and modify keywords

- Manage your presence in Yandex Catalog

- Import data from XLS and CSV files

The interface is very convenient, in my personal opinion. Commander window is divided into 3 panels

1. Campaigns

2. Ads

3. Keywords

The panels can be minimized if needed. I really like the fact that you don’t need to switch between tabs, but can edit the campaign at all levels simultaneously.

Direct Commander window

Of course, since it is the first version, there are a lot of functions that are missing. For example, it is impossible to download campaigns into Excel. Would be also nice to have the Yandex keyword tool (Wordstat) incorporated into the tool.

I am looking forward to more features in Direct Commander, but it’s already a big improvement. The tool is going to be great help to all search engine marketers optimizing for Yandex.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Just a few hours ago Yandex announced that next week they will launch yet another version of their search algorithm! This time the change is aiming at eliminating “over-optimized” content, i.e. texts stuffed with keywords and almost unreadable for the end user due to that.

Yandex recommend the webmasters, who intentionally over-optimized their websites’ content in order to improve positions in the search results, to go through the texts and make them more reader-friendly.

Yandex also promise that penalized for “over-optimization” pages will come back to their old positions once the problem is fixed.

SearchEngines.ru in their coverage of the algorithm stated that already last week one could unusually big chnges in Yandex search results, which probably were related to the first roll-out stage:

* SERP updates for Yandex, as well as the other major search engines, can be monitored using Update Analyzer from Analyzethis.ru. Awesome and very useful tool, when working with SEO for Yandex, since, as I wrote in my earlier posts, Yandex is rolling out big updates on a regular basis.

I would like to remind you once again that Yandex is extremely good at understanding Russian language, its grammar and morphology. If you are using auto-translated or auto-generated content on your Russian version of the website (which is unfortunatelly quite common), you’ve got one week to re-write it in a good language

You can test the new algorithm in action on buki.yandex.ru – Yandex’s sandbox open for everyone’s use.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Only recently Google announced support of so-called Authorship Markup, and at the same time Yandex declared a war against content theft.

In Yandex Search Blog they called all webmasters to Alpha-Test the new tool in Yandex Webmaster Tools kit called “Original Texts”. To be able to participate in this test, you need to have a site with TIC of at least 10.

All you need to do to claim your content authorship in WM tools is to

1. Add a module called “Original texts” in “Site Content” tab.

2. Submit your original content into the tool some time BEFORE publishing it online.

This information is supposed to be used by the algorithm to determine (and consequently rank) the original content (however there is no guarantee that it will be used, say Yandex)

The texts/ articles are recommended to be something between 2000 and 3200 characters long.

It’s too early to say if this new technology will help to make the Internet a fairer place Seems like a challenging task in terms or processing times and server capacity, but time will tell, and for now, thank you Yandex!

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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In my last post I wrote how important the behavioral factors are for SEO for Yandex. Researching that subject more, I stumbled upon very curious piece of software called “Userator”. This software is supposed to simulate users’ behavior and by that improve your positions in Yandex.

Obviously it is a very spammy thing. Moreover, most probably it is a scam, however one can’t be 100% sure here. Not so long ago Yandex made an official statement (in Russian) that they are aware of these kind of software, consider it being spam and will penalize websites trying to fake CTR and other behavioral factors by using bots. That makes one think that these softwares might actually work, and since Yandex cannot identify which clicks are ”real” and which are ”fake”, they are just trying to scare spammers. Who knows.

The idea of the Userator system is stupid simple. They recruit people, who get paid for installing Userator software on their computers and delivering fake clicks to the sites in the system (done by the software; the owner of the computer has no idea what is happening in the background and can use his/her computer as usually). People get paid for doing nothing = Great! Always works in Russia…

For the clients Userator does the following:

a) Simulates clicks from Yandex/ Google/ Rambler SERPs for desired search queries and ”stays” on the website for a period of time. The length of stay can be configured in the system. This also gave spammers the idea to use Userator to hurt the competitors’ websites by configuring the system to bounce from their pages ranking for the same key terms.

b) Simulates clicks to the client’s website from links on other sites (client’s backlinks), by that ”strengthening” the links and making them more trustworthy. Again, everything here is configurable.

At the moment the Userator thing reports over 6000 client websites (not much) with over 46 000 search queries in use. Clicks are driven to these websites from 2,5k different IPs. The fake users stay on clients’ sites for about 20 minutes on average.

I tried to find reviews or blog entries about using Userator as a part of SEO strategy, but didn’t come across anything sufficient, apart from this happy user, if that was a real user at all (in Russian)…

For all of us these new behavioral factors, unlike links, are something intangible. It is hard to estimate the effect of better CTR and longer average time spent on a site. No one really knows if faking user behavior is worthwhile. I firmly believe it’s useless and will hurt more than help, sooner or later. Quality sites, good content, strong incoming links and usability are the things that are really important for SEO. Having all that, the behavioral factors will come naturally.

Or what do you think?

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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After the lame talk about SEO for Yandex Andy and Rand gave at SMX, I thought would be good to write something more practical; how it works with Yandex for real.

Recently I wrote a short update on new algorithm and technologies Yandex uses to rank websites, and these are the practical tips on how to optimize for Yandex in the age of Krasnodar, MatrixNet and Spektr.

Yandex SEO is in a way quite similar to Google SEO, but with a twist

Just a couple of years ago, before Snezhinsk, Yandex SERP was quite easy to manipulate. All you needed is links, and everything would do: footers, side bars, sites about dogs, sites about kitchen furniture or plastic windows. All you needed is quantity. Links were easy to get through link brokers like Sape.ru and alikes.

In 2009 Yandex started to tweak their algorithm to get rid of spam and provide their users with good information, just like any other search engine. The algorithm has become very complex and, as they claim, intelligent. The technology behind it is called MatrixNet, which is in essence a technology of machine learning. Yandex learns what people wants and refines the SERPs based on the learnings.

Just like with Google, nobody knows all the factors taken into consideration by Yandex. Just like with Google, there are best practices that work.

Onsite SEO for Yandex

Onsite SEO is very similar to what you would do for Google: content is the king and all that…

- Relevance of the page to the search query: keywords in Title and Meta Description tags; keywords in Meta Keywords tag (does not really help much in my opinion, but some people would argue), keywords in ALT tags for images.

- Content: the content should be unique and of a good quality. It is vital to maintain good grammar, as Yandex is very good with understanding Russian language. Just like with Google, it is important to update the website with fresh content on a regular basis. And lastly, create clusters of pages for similar keywords to strengthen the relevancy.

- Internal linking: Yandex likes internal links in content. Do not rely solely on navigation and footer. Place internal links with optimized anchor texts into the content.

- Site quality: do everything to keep the website healthy. Make sure that there are no broken links, that all pages work and 404 error is configured correctly. Make a good use of your robots.txt. This does not only help Yandex to identify your website as a quality resource, but also provides good user experience for the visitors.

In the latest versions of the algorithm the weight of onsite SEO factors seems to be increasing.

Make sure to not over-optimize the page. Avoid keyword stuffing and thin content. Just like Googel, Yandex does not like that.

Offsite SEO for Yandex (aka link building)

Link building in Russia is a pretty wild and aggressive area. Two years ago I attended an SEO conference in Moscow, where Yandex representative declared from the stage that they are aware of the fact that 90% of all links in RuNet (aka Russian internet) are paid, and that they are going to fight that.

Yet, this year browsing job listings in Moscow I stumbled on a well-paid SEO job in one of the leading Online Marketing agencies in Russia, where one of the main requirements was “profound knowledge of the main link brokers and their features”. Links are being bought openly via link brokers; and it works. I honestly prefer not to use platforms like Sape.ru and have a more personal approach, but nevertheless, what you need to keep in mind doing link building in Russia is:

- Do not get links from low quality sites which are clearly made for the purpose of selling links. It does not really work anymore.

- Do not get links in footers and other spammy areas. That does not work either.

- Aim for on-topic websites, i.e. sites in your vertical. That will help to improve you rankings, build authority and increase TIC (aka Page Rank of Yandex).

- Aim for quality websites: good content, respectful domain age, good number of indexed pages, high TIC, no or very few sold links on the website.

- When getting links via brokers, you are often required to pay for a period of time (e.g. month, year etc.). That is generally not great. Try to get links that will stay on the website forever, e.g. in news and articles. It looks more natural both in terms of placement and stability of link growth.

From my experience, links from newspapers work pretty well. You can either approach their PR people and pay a lot of money to be placed in a good section; or buy articles in some hidden sub-categories via platforms like Miralinks.

- Make sure your links look natural, like they were placed by webmaster and for the readers, and not by SAPE script and for Yandex.

- Some Russian directories are still good, for example Yandex Catalog.

Behavioral factors taken into account by Yandex’s ranking algorithm

With implementation of Matrixnet, behavioral factors has become an important part of optimizing websites for Yandex. The SEO community is uncertain, which metrics Yandex looks at and where they collect the data.

Obviously Yandex has it’s Yandex.Metrika (analytics package, similar to Google Analytics) and Yandex toolbar, but I don’t know if this data can be reliable for them. I couldn’t find any numbers regarding the percentage of sites using Yandex.Metrika. For what I know, Google Analytics is quite popular in Russia.

Many SEOs speculate about behavioral factors, but the most common opinion is that the most important ones are:

- CTR from the SERP

- Average time spent on the page after the click from the SERP

- Bounce rate from the page back to the SERP

So the tips are classic: write compelling titles and descriptions, create interesting content and provide good user experience.

The quality of your SEO efforts, both onsite and offsite, will be rewarded by Yandex with trust and higher rankings!

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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How much traffic can we potentially get if we rank #1 for this keyword? How much our traffic will increase if we go from position X to position Y for that keyword? Have you ever asked yourself these questions? Whether a keyword is good, whether it is worth focusing on..

When working with Google all we have is Google search volumes, which are often far far away from the real numbers, and the old AOL click distribution model. When it comes to Russian search engines (Yandex, Google, Mail.ru, Rambler), more reliable statistics is available. First of all, Yandex shows actual search volumes for keywords on a monthly basis (only broad match though). Second, there is this fabulous click distribution model I am going to write about.

I heard about this method of estimating Yandex keyword traffic at the Optimization.ru conference in November 2009, but never got to use it until now. I was very impressed, because the results were quite close to the reality.

The traffic estimation method is based on statistics, provided by Liveinternet.ru. Liveinternet.ru is a web counter, which happens to be installed on around 70% of Russian websites. While individual stats are hidden, you can see how many clicks all sites with Liveinternet counter installed receive for a certain keyword on aggregated level. The stats are daily, hence the fluctuations are quite big from day to day, but taking an average values will give you good insights.

Liveinternet counter icon. Usually located in a footer.

One important thing to know: if you are coming from IP outside Russia, you will be automatically redirected to the English page of Liveinternet, which does not have the same features as the Russian one. If you want to use Liveinternet for traffic estimation, switch to the  Russian version (in the top right corner). The Russian interface will look like this:

Russian version of Liveinternet.ru start page

This is not all. Liveinternet also made public their click distribution model. The distribution shows percentages of clicks in total Liveinternet traffic, which websites receive depending on position is SERP. Please note, that the percentages are not CTR from the SERPs and not related to Yandex search volumes in any way.

The Liveinternet distribution looks as follows:

• Position 1 – 12-25%
• Position 2 – 8-20%
• Position 3 – 6-16%
• Position 4 – 5-12%
• Position 5 – 4-12%
• Position 6 – 4-10%
• Position 7 – 3-8%
• Position 8 – 3-6%
• Position 9 – 2-5%
• Position 10 – 1-4%

Example of traffic estimation based on Liveinternet data and click distribution model

Keyword:  дешевые джинсы (cheap jeans). Liveinternet returns the following graphs:

Liveinternet daily click statistics and break down by search engine

Liveinternet statistics shows that “cheap jeans” receives 150 clicks per day on average -> 4500 clicks per month on average. This includes all search engines traffic, ant the traffic is broken down  search engine, which is quite interesting as well.

According to the model, if a website ranks nr 1 for “cheap jeans”, it will receive up to 1125 clicks per month for this keyword. Funny enough, googlers seems to search for cheap jeans more that Yandex users

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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