Recommendations for the correct presentation of the site within Yandex search
Additional information that can be sent to the search can be different. Some part of it is connected directly to the ranking of the site - the better the search will understand the purpose of the resource, its audience, the more correctly it will rank it. The other part is related to the visual representation of the site in the search - this is an area to which you can actively influence. In this article, we will discuss in detail how to tell the search, which region the site belongs to, how to provide additional information for the site's snippet, and how to properly tell the search about how useful and interesting the site is to users.
Information about the region of the site
The assignment of the right region to the site is difficult to overestimate. Pizza in Vladivostok can be terrifically tasty, however, it's completely useless for a user from Moscow or St. Petersburg who wants to get his pizza hot and not in a week. The same with delivery - the user chooses the store and the site from which he will quickly and conveniently get the selected product.
The search very much appreciates the information about the region of the site, therefore it tries to collect it independently - through the analysis of the site content, however, no one knows better than the owner what region his site works in or what region can be useful for its development. It is better if the webmasters themselves will indicate this information.
There are three ways to do this:
The easiest way is to specify the region via Webmaster. To do this, go to the "Regionality" section in the Webmaster, select the desired region, specify a link to the page with contacts (other regional information), and save the settings. A feature of adding regionality via Webmaster is that for one site you can assign only one region.
As for businesses declaring that they are delivered throughout the country, around the world or throughout the universe - practice shows that many overestimate their capabilities. Ambitiousness is good, but if you are not a big player in the market and can not serve the users with the same speed and quality in Krasnodar and Kazan, it is better not to specify the whole of Russia for the region, but focus on the region where you work most.
The second way is to specify the region through Yandex. Its difference is that through the directory there is a confirmation no longer of the site, but of the organization, and the assignment of regions is taking into account the location of the branches of the organization. Advantages of the Directory are that in addition to the ability to specify different regions (including branches), the organization begins to appear on Maps.
You can add an organization to the Directory yourself, or confirm the rights to it, if it has already been found and entered there by Yandex itself. Verification takes place on the phone - from the call center to the number of the organization and via transmitting the code, which you then need to enter into a special form in the Directory, thereby confirming the rights. Furthermore, it allows the owner of the organization to monitor the relevance of the presented information, add or change photos, collect customer reviews and respond to them, and collect statistics - how many people were interested in the organization, what they were looking for next and so on.
In addition to the already familiar statistics on impressions and clicks, the restarted Directory manages to collect requests for headings, puts these data on a map and notices competitors there, showing statistics not only for a particular organization, but also for organizations of competitors, allowing the business to compare indicators and improve.
The third way to add a region is to specify it through Yandex.Catalog. Adding through this tool is also quite simple, but it's worth remembering two features:
Only 7 regions can be assigned through the Catalog
The queue for moderation
Adding a site to Yandex.Catalog is free, but in order to speed up the moment of entering the site, you can pay for moderation. It is also important to remember that, both for free and for paid moderation, the application can be rejected. Therefore, even before the addition, it is important to make sure that the site complies with the rules of the Catalog.
Yandex recommends using all three ways in order to assign the site to as many regions as possible (if necessary).
Site submission within the search
The presentation of the site in the search is closely related to the snippet. Snippet is a description of the site page in the SERP. The snippet should be treated as an instrument for obtaining traffic.
The snippet has demonstrations, clicks and CTR, and every webmaster can and must analyze these metrics to understand how the snippets of different pages are displayed in the search and whether they satisfy the users. To do this, the Webmaster has a special section called "Search queries", where you can specify the most interesting requests and see how your site appears in the tops, how snippets are formed and what their CTR is:
How to affect the snippet? Above are the simplest snippets - Webmasters and news agencies. As you can see, a simple snippet consists of a header, a website address and a description. Here the webmaster can influence almost everything.
The title and description can be retrieved from both the title and description service tags, as well as from the text on the page itself, from the micro-markup, or from the description in the Yandex.Catalog. To understand where the search took any particular information for the snippet from, you need to go through the search to the page of interest, open its code, and search by code to find the exact combination that was specified in the snippet. With great probability you will find where this information was pulled from.
If suddenly there is no information on the page that is in the snippet, there are two options: the description is taken from the Yandex.Catalog, or the information from the page has been deleted. Yandex does not invent anything and takes the information for a snippet solely from those sources. The presence of a text on a page can be checked by opening a saved copy of the page.
To correct the description in the snippet, you can fix it on the page and wait for reindexing.
Unfortunately, there is no answer to the question - "What should be the ideal snippet?". But we need to remember that the snippet is an entity directly related to the query.
A good kind of snippet is completely unrelated to the query, because it is quite obvious that the user already knows what the Sportmaster is, he is interested in whether there is a branch of this store at the necessary metro station. Here we see that the snippet does not solve the user's problem in any way, because it is completely unclear if the information he requires is on that same page. It is all the more frustrating in this case, because this snippet leads to an excellent landing page of the desired store in Prague, with the exact address, map, hours of work and contact phone. The problem is that standard title and description are specified for the page, which are specified automatically for the pages of this site.
Here are the template title and description for all pages, as well as the strange repetition of what is written in the title, also in the description, as well as the habit of completely leaving them blank - and these are the main reasons for the appearance of "bad", idle snippets within the search.
How to affect the favicon? Create an image with a size of 16 × 16 pixels (the preferred format is ICO, but other formats are possible: GIF, JPEG, PNG and BMP), place the favicon.ico file in the root directory of the site, give a link to it in the <head> element.
The register of the site name also may be influenced. If the site name consists of a set of words, then it is possible and necessary to improve the readability with a different case of letters. This can be done in Yandex.Webmaster in the "Register of the site name" section and by specifying a new spelling there. It is important for the user to see exactly where in the section of the site, he will get by clicking on this page. Yandex forms navigation chains automatically. What influences their formation?
First, and foremost - a clear structre of the site. Therefore, it is very important for site owners to make sure that the site has a good menu, good directories and logically arranged ways to search for the selected product or section.
How to influence quick links in the site's snippet? Unfortunately – you cannot. Quick links are formed automatically by Yandex, based on the data collected on the site, from the signal that the sections on the site are most interesting to users. It is impossible to initiate or speed up the process of the appearance of quick links in the snippets of your site
For those sites for which quick links have already been generated, it is possible to choose which ones to show and which ones not to show through the Webmaster's office.
The organization address specified in the snippet is taken from the Directory and this process is also fully automated
All that was told above is what a webmaster or site owner can influence things right now and on their own. The rest of the possibilities are already associated with micro-markup - the transfer of search to certain structured data. Yandex has affiliate programs that allow Yandex to transmit such data, icluding:
goods and prices
Recipes
evaluation and feedback
and others
Affiliate programs are divided into two categories - one related to the direct submission of the site on the search, and other with the presentation of the site in other, parallel Yandex search, for example, in the search for the Market.
In conclusion, I want to say that the presentation of the site on the search today is impossible without considering mobile search. A good adaptation of the site to mobile format is accounted for by the search in the ranking, so it is recommended to use different types of site preparation for perception from mobile devices, as well as a turbo page.
