As a companion to our SEO page, this piece goes through the 12 most important parameters for 2023 and the years just after it. This data holds for 2023 to 2028 and may lose its validity, or may already have lost it, from 2028 onward.
Whatever else it is, this can carry our own subjective judgments as Türk SEM. If you have thoughts about our content, you can put your questions to us in the comments.
Publishing High Quality Content Consistently (21%)
The word consistency suggests something continuous, but it should not be read as daily. If one piece a week goes up systematically, that counts as consistent publishing. What matters here is the definition of “high quality” content. Your content should be as readable and as clear as it can be, with a title that describes what is inside.
Keywords in the Meta Title (15%)
The title is one of our highest priorities. But; the description has always mattered to Google too. To keep its own results tidier and more informative, Google gave priority to pages that carry one.
- Title: 13%
- Description: 2%
Site Trustworthiness (14%)
Make sure your content is consistent, accurate and provable. Google has done serious work on detecting inconsistencies and it keeps doing it. If your sources include an author, a government body or a university study, cite them. Pick up too many inconsistent content flags and your whole SEO effort can suffer for it.
Backlinks (12%)
If readers like your content they may link to you, from their own blogs or their social media accounts. The more you get talked about, the more that can add to your value. But; you should know that Google understands which links are not natural. Which is why this is something to do alongside a specialist rather than on your own.
Niche Expertise (11%)
In large sectors the opening is the most important part. On brand new projects we work by induction. On large, settled projects we work by deduction. The inductive method starts in a very narrow niche and moves up one level at a time, carrying on toward the main target, which for us is building the best portal in Turkish. If you make the best one, luck stops being a factor.
User Engagement (10%)
User engagement is about how much “exchange of information” happens with your site. Picture a site that has produced the most thorough content there is about keyboards and gives away the most valuable information. Imagine it covers everything from the first keyboard ever invented to the most modern ones. And say another site sells keyboards with one sentence and one photo. Follow flat SEO logic and the portal explaining keyboards page after page ought to come first, but that is not what happens.
If the user typed “keyboard”, they probably want to buy a keyboard. How the keyboard is made may not concern them much at all. So Google can take that keyboard selling portal, the one the user engaged with, and put it in first place on the strength of user engagement, using the data coming in from places like Chrome and Analytics.
Internal Links (5%)
Internal links are one of the most important parts of on-page SEO and they have to be laid out with care. They let Google build a picture of where each piece of content sits inside the site, and at the same time they move your visitor across to the relevant page, which puts a good many valuable parameters to work.
Do not forget this: the page you like best and most want people to see is worth more to Google than the others.
Mobile Friendly / Mobile First (5%)
Watch that your site’s responsive settings are flawless. If you have doubts, PageSpeed will give you the truest answer.
Page Speed (2%)
Make sure even users on a slow mobile connection are getting through to your site in under 12 seconds.
Site Security / SSL Certificate (2%)
If you have a WordPress site and you have installed an SSL certificate, make sure you have the Really Simple SSL plugin in place.
Rich Results / Structured Data (1%)
Use of this has gone up a lot lately because of what it does for click-through rates. Visit the Google Rich Results page to find out what your site qualifies for.
Keywords in the URL (1%)
A generic domain always counts. If your domain carries the phrase people are searching for, that will add value. Gelinlik.org, one of the sites we work on, is generic in exactly that way (gelinlik is the Turkish word for wedding dress). Try not to stray from the .com, .net and .org trio.
Keywords in the H1 (1%)
Since 2020 Google has now and then started showing the contents of the “h1” tag in its results ahead of the “title” in the meta. My own view is that in time the H1 heading will carry the same weight as the title.
