If before SEO experts focused, and used primarily to promote the quantitative factors, such as the references, the number of keywords in the text and title, anchors, etc., now it is time to move on the qualitative characteristics, improving the design of the site, usability and making web sites for visitors, not for robots.

What is useful to note:

Traffic sources to your website.

Where visitors come to your website, this will help you to understand what resources or search queries use users, to visit your site. It is necessary to monitor developments in your web site statistics. Usually you can find problems with some existing and valuable source, and the emergence of new traffic sources. Perhaps the specificity of new visitors or traffic sources will require additional changes to the site.

Search queries.

Use this information to track new search keywords or phrases that users use to visit your site.

Try to make your visitors to pay attention to your landing pages. For example, you can make a possibility for your visitors, to buy best products. Percentage of users who have committed the act is called conversion. There is a lot of books, about how to increase conversion, but is essential to constantly testing and analyze the effect of the changes. Do not stop to change visual representation of your site, place significant internal links that can help to users to follow the goal.

You must be provide monitoring on the technical parameters of the user’s computer – the screen resolution, browser version, operating system. Sometimes, different browsers and at different resolutions show your site by a different way that you think. Try to take this into account and, if possible, try to check often.

Webmasters commonly used stats counters like Google Analytics or Yandex Metrika, for the analysis, of user behavior. Behavioral factors are crucial, and your efforts targeted to website usability can improve the quality of traffic.

As you know, many sites attract significant traffic trough successful video marketing. Popularity of video marketing increased day by day.

Often in response to a requests, both Google and Yandex mixes videos in the search results. To achieve better search engines results, video content must be a markup according to schema.org Video objects standards. Google began to recognize video markup today. Yandex can identify and recognize video microdata, too.

The markup is extremely simple, and microdata tags can be added to most sites by easy way.

A standard video player with markup might look like this:

For right duration parameter of the item (movie, audio recording, event, etc.) use ISO 8601 date format.

Google recommend also, to use a Video Sitemap. Video sitemap alerts Google for any new or updated videos faster and provides advanced functionality such as a country and platform restrictions.

The total turnover of online shops in Russia in 2011 amounted to 244.6 billion rubles. In the past year, total turnover of online stores estimated at 176 billion rubles. Thus, the market grew 39%.

According InSales (InSales), now in Russia, has about 25,000 retail online stores, compared the 16 000 stores in 2010. The growth of 56%. This figure is derived from the analysis of open sources on the number of stores, as well as on the basis of analysis of the InSales company’s customers.

InSales experts identified in 2012 the following brands categories, based by a large number of segments. Some are of interest in terms of growth and processes occurring within the segment:

• Clothing and footwear
• Group buying
• Cosmetics and Beauty
• Zoo products

Segment of the group buying in Russia increases steadily in 2011. Two players in this segment, Biglion and Groupon, confidently entered the Top 30 largest internet shops.

It is also interesting that a very niche segment of “Zoo products” has almost doubled in turnover of the previous year.

“Cosmetics and Beauty” has shown strong growth up to 2011. The impressive increase of almost 50%. 2011 can be considered the year of clothings and footwear. The leaders of the market move to the high turnover, as an engine of this segment. Behind them has a large number of smaller shops. Many of them were launched in 2011.

In addition, two new players in segment “Clothing”, reach the top stores whit significant turnover. This are Sapato.ru, and Lamoda.ru. Lamoda.ru was launched in the spring of 2011.

Yandex announced nowadays a collaboration contract with Twitter. New tweets posted on Twitter will now become available in Yandex’s Blog Search results in rial time.

In addition to Yandex’s Blog site search, people who seek out some thing up about Tweets will even get the identical, results by means of twitter.yandex.ru.

Tweets of over two million users are achievable for search on Russian search engine Yandex. Twitter posts of tweeps who post in Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian or Kazakh, as well as best, feeds in other languages, will be included in Yandex’s Blog Search results.

The system’s users can search by twitter username and # hashtags.

With more than 250 million tweets a day, Twitter is a valuable information source, and the fastest way to find out what’s happening in your world,” said April Underwood, Twitter Director of Business Development.

Yandex has more than 60 percent market share in Russia, ahead of Google.

A day ago Yandex announced its social search program, aimed at increase its search engine’s quality by adding content from social network. Yandex enveloped a beta version of people finder. Yandex users in Russia can now view all public profiles of a person with social accounts in the country’s most popular social and blogging websites, such as VK, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Odnoklassniki.

Along with developing Twitter bottles in to its search engine results, Yandex has also updated the Blog Look for API, a useful internet marketer device for making providers based on microblogging content.

No, they show most relevant information about medicaments in top positions.

Every day, millions of Russian users send queries in Yandex about issues, related to health: the symptoms of disease, hospitals, medicines and ways to treat ailments.

We try to help to users to find where the nearest medical clinics or pharmacies. As of today Yandex still show relevant information about medicines directly to the search results. If visitors do not have the instructions for use, they quickly and easily can find information, for contraindications, side effects and methods of using drugs. All the information we collect from the Register of medicinal products in Russia, said Yandex team member.

Currently Yandex shows info about the drug in top position, in search results. Users can find useful links like drug description, drug uses, indications, how to take, dosage, special warnings and precautions. We found that this option works only in queries in Russian language.

Image tagging Marketing increase after Pinterest success and become popular around the world. Fast Lane Ventures launched in Russia a social service for storing and sharing images Pinme.ru. This is a new investment project of Fast Lane Ventures, which established on the model of a startup Pinterest.com, occupying, according to Alexa.com, the 327 th most visited website in the world and 55th in the U.S..

The concept of the project – a virtual board, which can be pin to pin a picture, which reflected in the Pinme logo. Pinme.ru platform built considering the interests of users. They have the opportunity not only to make collections of photos and video, but also rank them by themes and interests, and find content on the topics of interest to them. In fact, this is “online board,” on which users can pin-add any favorite picture from the Internet.

Visitors have the ability to create lists of their interest by filling them with visual content, show their collections to friends, make a note own and to others’ collections. With each picture, users can go to source on the web that provides for these resources a significant return traffic.

Subscribers receive free access to all accounts that can keep track of updated collections of his friends, to leave their own comments and “Repin» (to repin-copy) their favorite images in their collections.

According to the founders of start-up to 2013, Pinme.ru plans to achieve 90% recognition among the Russian population. The Pinme.ru target audience are active men and women from 20 to 40 years.

At the moment in Russia Pinme.ru is a fundamentally new social format that combines the functions photo banks, social networks and bookmarks “Favorites”.

The initial investment of Fast Lane Ventures and a group of international investors is around million euro. The total amount of planned investments – 5,000,000 euro.

 
Go.mail.ru search introduced to Russian users first mobile application for iPhone / iPad with voice search.

Once the application detects a voice request, automatically offered to user additional search options, thematically related to the previous one. In addition, voice queries also allows the application of the traditional text-based search using the touch screen.

Technological feature of the application – its ability to “learn” by using the accumulated requests. Therefore, as the use of the application will increase the quality of search.

New application is now available for download at the Apple Store or on iTunes - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id497341490.

In the near future, the developers promise to release a new version of the mobile Go.mail.ru, which will have the opportunity to make images search queries and queries to otvet.mail.ru (Question and Answer site).

In addition, Mail.ru provides – the possibility of realization of offline access to the search results. This feature will allow people to work with information found in any environment, even without the need of Internet access.

Valentines Day is the famous day where many people share their love to their friend family and everybody close to them by giving a gift.

Love your family and your friends but do not forget your clients and visitors.

Daily “Valentine’s day” related searches have increased significantly over last year, according to Google trends.

Yandex ranked “valentines day” theme in top 10 russian blogs themes for February 14, 2012.

Do not waste more time.

Here, are 8 SEO/SMO quick and easy ways to show someone your love.

1. Tweet Valentine’s Day Wishes to your followers.
2. Share Velentine Day image or video on Facebook.
3. Send a greeting card from Yandex.

4. Post article about love like go.mai.ru, for example.
5. Make killer leading page related to Valentine’s Day.
6. Publish ads in Google or Yandex Direct whit best Valentine’s day wishes.
7. Send mail to all of your clients.
8. Make special 24h discount for your services.

New research published today by the VCIOM - Russian Public Opinion Research Center team looking at the effect of social media in Russia.

«Rating popular social media»

The share of Internet users in Russia by the beginning of this year has already reached 55% (six months ago – 49%), and the most rapidly growing share of this daily web users (from 30 to 36%). 45% Do not use Internet, compared to a year ago the figure was 50%.

82% of Internet users use social networks (even in 2010 the figure was 52%). The typical user of social media – a man aged 18-24 years (96%), who lives in Moscow and St. Petersburg (94%).

The most popular social networking sites on the Russian internet (Runet) – Odnoklassniki – ”Classmates” (they prefered by 73% of Internet users) and VK “Vkontakte” (62%). Third place goes to a network of Moi Mir – “My World”, whose popularity has grown significantly (from 22 to 31%).

Significantly increased the audience overseas networks «Facebook» (from 5 to 18%) and «Twitter» (from 2 to 9%). Percentage of users other networks do not exceed 6%.

Source: VCIOM – Russia Public Opinion Research Center

As we have noted several times social networks are crucial. In fact, perhaps you are tired of listening to such allegations without they are justified by the facts. SEO changes and decisions go beyond the well-known techniques such as link building or internal optimization. Well, unfortunately for search engines, people are get going to spend more and more time on social networks, and this no doubt reflects the demand for information through search engines. A recent study from Comscore shows this trend and reported a decrease in searches queries. Google sites -3%, Yahoo-4%, Microsoft sites -2%, Ask Network -1%, Aol Inc. -3%.

According to Comscore, Social Networking accounted for 16.6 percent of all online minutes at the end of 2011. Facebook continues to lead as the driving force behind this shift in consumer behavior, accounting for the largest share of online minutes across the entire web in 2011.

As to the Russian SNS (social network sites), VK is indeed a leader, and you can be sure about VK top position in the Russian Internet.

85% of SNS-using adults say that their experience on the sites is that people are generally kind, compared with 5% who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5% who say their answer depends on the situation, pewinternet.org research show.

Perhaps such results will be a similar study in Russia.

Yet why G +? Google search occupies a significant place among Russian consumers and although lags behind Yandex generate significant traffic to the Russian sites. If you are ready to be missing from this traffic and you want to rely only on Yandex, probably in that case, you don’t need G+ Business Page in Russian.

Yes, of course you can achieve excellent results in Google without own G+ Business Page. But this is an excellent additional opportunity for you. Russian members of G + grow rapidly probably because the this network has some very good advantages. As You know each network develops slowly. Those of you who have accounts on social networks know that the fans or followers is growing slowly and gradually. Step by step. But, the effort worthwhile.

If your goals to for the Russian market are significant, the omission of this option is a mistake. Next year might be too late. So think To G+, or not to G+ carefully.