How to Get Your Site to the Top of Search Results: SEO Trends in 2023

Search systems often change their algorithms, methods of ranking sites, and their indexing. As a result, SEO is changing significantly every few years but without such changes, it is impossible to bring resources quickly into the search engine's top ranks. Let's try to understand in this article the methods of improving SEO in 2023 and its main trends that will be working in the coming years. All the described trends will help to make the site better for searching systems and robots.

Fixing technical problems on the site to improve SEO

The basic rule for effective website promotion is to meet technical standards. These include a number of actions:

1. Ensuring speedy loading of pages.
2. Minimizing code.
3. Using canonical URLs.
4. Installation of SSL-certificates on sites.

In today's realities, any successful website must be adaptive and convenient to work on mobile devices. It should include clear navigation with the convenience of using it. Thus, search engines will start ranking sites based on the text-to-code ratio.

The following elements must be present on the website:

1. Site map adapted for search robots and people.
2. Optimized images due to the small size.
3. Supporting text of any image on the site.

There are many techniques for a local SEO audit. Any site owner can apply them. Although they are not perfect, heavily simplified with the verification of SEO experts, but they help to see the general direction of what is important to refine and improve on certain pages.

Selection and correct application of keywords

Such a trend was and is still popular for website promotion. Keywords belong to the category of local SEO strategy. However, search engines are improving and ranking in 2023 is based on the quality and relevance of keywords, which causes them to be more important.

Any keyword phrases, individual words should be related to the site's activities, its products with people orientation. The right combination makes it possible to create a sales funnel, provides guarantees for customers when searching for a product, service or information will come to your site. Search engines will be able to bring it to the top because of the right keywords and their implementation in the text.

Long tail phrases and words work well. These are the ones which are important for people to buy something. Instead of the usual targeting for a specific phrase, you need to use country and city targeting.

It is important to note that working with "long tails" traffic might come to the site less but it will be turned into a sale much more often, as it is focused not just on the client but on specific locations. After all, if a person lives in Ukraine and is looking for a wedding cake, he is not interested in sites that offer similar products outside of Ukraine, it is even better in this case focus on a specific city.

Working on content quality

Content quality is a trend that passes from year to year when it comes to websites. People want to see only useful information from any site. The material on the site should be useful, so that a person after reading the information will be sure that the article is from an expert who understands a particular issue, after that they will be strongly inclined to contact and receive an offer, when it comes to sales, etc.

Creating quality content with a focus on the target audience and keywords, automatic and organic ranking occurs. All of this leads to a minimization of time to find pay-per-click advertising and other promotional techniques. In other situations, you have to buy traffic but if you turn off such an advertising campaign, new customers will immediately disappear. If the site is considered by search algorithms to be authoritative in a particular area, the owner will always be at the top, gaining new users.

Good textual content will simplify other SEO techniques. These can include link building, working with social media marketing, as there are several distinctive means in comparison with other sites and this is referred to algorithms during the promotion of the site.

Robots in search engines take into account all the content on the site, so it is important to make sure it is the basis of the whole strategy for promotion.

At the same time, it can be supplemented by other types of materials:

• video;
• voice addition;
• slide show.

The described accompaniment allows you to attract more attention, more potential customers who are looking for the necessary information. No less effective option for improving SEO is using large articles and "content repository" from a number of related materials with the same keywords.

Using linkbuilding

Using links to improve your own site and its promotion is an ineffective method in 2023. In addition, search engine robots can impose fines and other penalties for creating and applying link mass. But there are a few subtleties.

The main goal of any changes in the search engines in recent years is to make sure that users on the Internet can get first to high quality content. In other words, if the site owner is already creating good content, then there is a 50% success rate in promotion.

Regardless of sanctions against sites conducting link buying or those who use other "black" methods of link building, they also evaluate the popularity of the site and the content as a whole. Links are one of the methods with more resources linking to a particular site, so the more search algorithms consider that site to be authoritative.

Due to the development and improvement of promotion methods, link building has changed significantly over the past few years. Now you can't simply get them from any source and assume it will have a positive effect on SEO. A quality-driven approach must be taken.

The key strategies working for 2023 are:

1. Own your campaign and website to register in different online directories in your region, where the link to the resource will be placed.
2. Create internal links in the articles, which will transfer customers to different directories. In this way there is an exchange between their content. Search robots take into account not only external links but also internal links. These give less effect on the promotion, but also take into account in SEO.
3. You can apply a tricky way - to make quality reviews, posts mentioning important resources in your personal industry, not competitors. Then contact the owners of social networks or sites, inform them that they are mentioned in the article and ask to put your link in their content.
4. Use third-party resources, such as ahrefs or SEMrush. It helps to find out who is referring to quality content in a particular niche and then make even better materials on similar topics. After that, contact the representatives of the site with a proposal to place link mass on their materials.
5. To subscribe to several accounts, groups in social networks in order to post your content. If the source proves to be authoritative with high quality but groups, companies and other sites will start linking to this or that articles.
6. Credible links give rights to their pages through resources like Yelp or Foursquare. When looking for a product or service, people will be able to get to your resource, because the algorithms will promote the site to the top.
7. Links placed on low-quality resources is important to remove, so periodically they need to be removed and checked.

Promoting through links, creating them is a trend which has not disappeared, but in 2023 you need the right approach to such a strategy. This is an important part of the promotion process. The main thing to remember that quality is more important than quantity.

Using Google and Bing

Systems like Google and Bing have a section called "My Business. It gives you the opportunity to announce your business to a wide audience. The whole process looks like this:

1. Create an account and apply it to Google or Yahoo to find your business.
2. Fill out your business details, other pages, forms.
3. Go through verification so that search engine robots determine the authenticity of ads.
4. Complete the registration procedure.

Such a procedure gives an opportunity to make the site noticeable in search engines, on their maps and customers will be able to leave feedback about cooperation with you in the network. According to statistics, all firms with a high ranking in search engine robots receive a higher percentage of traffic.

Excluding black SEO

Color schemes are used in the field of SEO, which are helpful in classifying the types of different strategies. Let's analyze the main methods of SEO promotion by color:

• White - optimization for search engines in accordance with all the requirements and rules. This kind of approach is authorized by search algorithms and following it, the site will not fall under sanctions.
• Black- optimization with shady techniques, which are not encouraged by search engine algorithms. Among them there is the acquisition of link mass or traffic, using key phrases in large numbers and copying articles or other content. In a short period it can give a positive effect, although as a result the site will fall under sanctions and will disappear from the top rankings.
• Gray - the average tactic between these two, but it is not in line with the basic rules and standards.

It is better to do nothing than to use black promotion methods and similar strategies. This will not only alienate the site from reaching the top but also lead to the complete blocking the resource.

The sequence of actions

Pursuing consistency is another trend for 2023 to improve SEO. Good promotion is a marathon and produces great results over a distance. When creating a good website, you need to work on targeting, tuning it to the right search terms. At the same time, it is important to publish a good content bearing benefit. Search engine robots will look for the resource, focus on it more often, so it becomes authoritative and can be trusted.

When this happens, the site will be an excellent sales lever. Of course, it takes time and effort, but immediately after the effect is achieved, you can be sure that the technique will work as long as you stick to it. So, it's better to get rid of gimmicks and work on improving the site, the content on it. It is important to respond quickly to posts, maintain a presence on social networks and search engines will encourage it.

IndexNow protocol for fast indexing

IndexNow allows new content on a site to be instantly indexed by search engine crawlers. When a site with IndexNow API integration creates new content, updates or deletes articles, the API sends the data immediately to search engines.

This feature is supported by:

• Yandex;
• Bing;
• Cloudflare;
• Google is testing.

Using the opportunity, the indexing pages will be faster and the search engine itself is less stressed, because robots do not have to re-learn everything, especially if the changes are minimal.

There are several steps to integrate:

1. Create and upload the API key document. This will confirm the fact of ownership to the website.
2. Install the downloaded document {your-key}.txt in UTF-8 encoding in the root.

After this operation it is possible to send URL to search engines via GET for one URL or via POST for several URLs (up to 10 000).

Using timecodes with answers to questions (for video content)

In the top of the results for 2021-2022 there are videos with the key query "how to make". The trend continues into 2023. Even today you can notice timecodes in videos and tags. As a result, any visitor of the site has the ability to jump quickly to the point where their question will be answered.

Over time, search engines are beginning to bring the site to the top, thanks to such an element of promotion, increasing the number of videos to the output. This method, although obvious, will help promotion in 2023.

In order to get videos in the output with such tags is necessary:

1. Add micro-tags via Clip Markup. To do this, you need to tell Google about the presence of timecode. In Video Object enter a timestamp and a tag to apply in the output of specific moments. Seek Markup sends the information to the Google search engine. To show the algorithms a particular moment in the video to the user, you need to use the SeekToAction property.
2. Adding chapters to clips allows YouTube videos to be broken down into sections based on topics. It enables the human and the search engine to understand the content and make tags for the snippet.
3. Adding subtitles can help display speech in videos, which also improves promotion. Automatic subtitles don't always translate successfully, so it's better to manually check or write everything.

The trends of SEO in 2023 remain the optimization of the headline, especially for videos. To promote, it is important not just to make a clear title, but also to make a description for the video and insert tags.

More attention to user-generated content

Search engines have their own AI, which is called search intent. With its help, it is possible to determine the intentions of a particular user. For example, by typing in a search "to buy Adidas sneakers" a person wants to find a store to buy the product and it refers to the commercial intent. If the query is used "how to make Adidas sneakers" - this is an informational intent.

Search engines are analyzing the user's behavior:

1. Refusal to view results.
2. Changing search engine queries.
3. Clarification of the information.

Thus, the AI understands the correctness of determining the intent and the necessity to display certain or other results. For example, you need to show an informational article in priority or store for shopping, catalog reviews, etc. In addition to the direction of the results, algorithms take into account the length and format of the content that would suit most users.

Content and people's behavior change from time to time. Search platforms are currently working to improve their understanding of intent. People who own websites should check what exactly the algorithm considers to give out the best content for certain queries. Content with different intents may be submitted for display, but the top 3 searches are taken as the basis.

To check the relevance of queries you need:

1. Entering the search key phrase from the semantic core.
2. Make a sample of links from the top of the extradition.
3. Conduct an analysis of sites, content, make a collection in a separate table, indicating the content, format of presentation, text length and other parameters that are important for promotion.
4. Make a summary of the parameters for personal content, trying to improve it.

Third-party services will help to simplify the described algorithm, but all tasks can be done manually.

Working with artificial intelligence

AI in 2023 will become even more advanced, it will analyze data better. It has developed such algorithms as:

• RankBrain;
• BERT;
• MUM by Google;
• YATI by Yandex.

People are starting to work with trending AI-based programs. Simplifying the work is done by searching for data through a photo, camera or copying text from an image, etc. AI isn't 100% perfect yet and it still needs to help processing the information on the site in order to recognize the data correctly.

Helping machines process content correctly can take several steps:

1. Make articles in simple, natural language so there is no complicated wording.
2. Engage in structuring content by separating important blocks, numbering, using headings, etc.
3. Add quality images.

Other trends are already being used for SEO promotion. They may be popular in 2023 and they include compliance with the characteristics of Core Web Vitals, E-A-T and others.

What has changed in SEO in 2022? Effective approaches for 2023-2024

As a conclusion and summary of the article, let's try to figure out what will be stable in 2023-2024, giving results in the promotion of sites. Adhering to simple rules in the work, you will get long-term results, profits and regular customers:

1. Versatility - is a systematic approach for promotion. This factor is the main for obtaining success in SEO. A large base of clientele, new traffic gives constant work with the site, filling it 1-2 times a week. To do this, you can create a thematic block with useful content, where you can add a section of questions for visitors, which will give new traffic. This approach can be considered a part of the marketing campaign.
2. Optimizing for people using mobile devices. Every year, mobile traffic is only increasing, with over 50% of people using tablets and smartphones to interact with websites in 2022. For SEO promotion and getting to the top, it's best to check how your website page looks on different devices, whether there is adaptation for tablets, smartphones and other gadgets. Search algorithms love resources that take care of people with convenience and optimization.
3. Analytics, which serves as a guide to SEO. If the owner of the site is not sure how to move forward in the promotion, you can always look at statistics, figures and change the content strategy. The first thing is important to consider the number of visitors from search engines, counting separately different resources (Google, Yandex, etc.). After that, look at the indicators on the depth of page views in time for 1 visit as well as the average time spent on the site and the percentage of rejection or other values.
4. Organic growth. Using analytics, site metrics, owners can affect the behavioral parameters. For example, statistics will show that 1 person looks at 1.5 pages per visit on the site. Being aware of this, you can improve the resource by adding links to your other articles, research, useful data to study, etc. You can add surveys, interactivity and so on. Through the linking builds up the involvement of people.
5. The usefulness of the information that solves the specific problems for visitors to the site. The main feature of SEO - the usefulness of content. In 2023, will benefit those resources that gather as much useful information for people with the ability to solve their problems. The entire marketing campaign should be focused on satisfying requests - this is the key to success.

Even in 2023, content marketing will lead SEO. Of course, no one can predict the future and identify 100% of the trends but a general idea and understanding of the direction to go after 2022 is in place. Already today, in order to get to the top is not only important quality content but also methods of working with the site and its credibility. The important thing is that the site should be verified and trusted by the search engines.

How to Get Your Site to the Top of Search Results: SEO Trends in 2023 key takeaways:

1. Fixing technical problems on the site to improve SEO
2. Selection and correct application of keywords
3. Working on content quality
4. Using linkbuilding
5. Using Google and Bing
6. Excluding black SEO
7. The sequence of actions
8. IndexNow protocol for fast indexing
9. Using timecodes with answers to questions (for video content)
10. More attention to user-generated content
11. Working with artificial intelligence
12. What has changed in SEO in 2022? Effective approaches for 2023-2024