Why Yandex Should Matter To Every Webmaster

Yandex is the most popular search engine in the Europe’s most populous nation, Russia. The rate of Internet usage in the country has grown significantly in recent years and continues to grow with increasing pace. Other search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask are way behind in search market share in the country. Only Rambler is giving a close fight and takes the second position. Google for example has less than 35% share, Bing has 0.4% while Yandex enjoys a clear leadership with 54.5% share, including Mail.ru. So, for any webmaster who wants to do search engine optimization for his/her site, in order to attract Russian Internet audience, Google may not be the right choice.

The Drawbacks:

At least in theory, Yandex.ru indexes only websites hosted in Russia and/or Russian-speaking countries, like Ukraine, etc. So, any site that has an IP address belonging to any of these countries will certainly be indexed, as long as it adheres to Yandex guidelines for webmasters. But what if your site is hosted outside of what it considers its territory? This is where frustration sets in. But relax, I will tell you how to get your site listed in Yandex and ranked, even if it is hosted in the US or UK, or even Africa. The best thing about this SEO strategy is that it’s not a black hat technique. It totally conforms to Yandex rules, which means you don’t have to worry about ever getting penalized.

Getting Listed In Yandex:

If you’re a Yandex user, you must have noticed that some non-Russian language websites do well on its SERPs. That’s no magic, but apparently because of sparse presence of Russian language on their web pages or other reasons. It is advisable to add some Russian text content to your web pages and enclose it with the proper W3C HTML markup, like the following example: <span lang=”RU”> Ваш русский язык идет здесь </ SPAN>.
If you really want to compete favorably and overwhelm your competition, create a Russian language version of your site, and insert the following language Meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags of the web pages: <META http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”RU”>. This declaration helps Yandex search spider to easily ascertain that the associated website is actually relevant to Russian Internet audience.
Submit your site to Russian web directories. Enlisting a site in top directories hosted in the country and its territories helps to get it noticed by the Russian web crawler.
Embark on a serious SEO campaign specifically targeting the Russian market. This can be a tricky business and hard, if you don’t speak Russian language. However, you can still get it done correctly by hiring an experienced Yandex search engine optimization specialist.
Finally submit your site to Yandex. To accomplish that, visit http://webmaster.yandex.ru, click on the “Add Site” link and register before you can be able to add your site’s URL. If you can’t read Russian language, use Google translation tool to translate from Russian to English.

There are numerous benefits of getting a website listed in Yandex and ranked. If you haven’t done so, you might be missing out on something very lucrative. Many webmasters like you are taking the advantage of this SEO treasure trove. Why can’t you do the same?