When search engines evaluate websites, they do not only look at the content on a particular page but also how that page connects to the rest of the digital ecosystem. How other websites and reputable brands engage with your site gives the search engines valuable signals about the authority of your own content.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks, or links that point from outside web pages back to your own site, provide your content with a number of different benefits. First, Google looks at backlinks to better understand how this particular piece of content should be viewed. Content that receives numerous backlinks from other sites with positive reputations appear more reputable. A good backlink strategy can help build the reputation of the site and boost your rankings.

Additionally, even though many people create backlinks to sites and mark them as ‘no follow’, they still provide benefits. Google has already said that they will begin to view ‘no follow’ commands more as a suggestion in their algorithm starting in the beginning of 2020, even though they previously ignored them completely. Furthermore, this backlink strategy can still drive traffic and engagement to your site, regardless of whether or not the link itself was ‘counted’ by Google as a positive point toward your reputation.

Consider also that if your site regularly receives backlinks from others in the industry build a reputation for your organization. Customers who often see the name of your business or your business leaders across various websites and publications will come to view you as a thought leader. This can boost their confidence in your organization and help give your site credibility as a thought leader, and 82 percent of c-suite leaders say that thought leadership encourages them to engage with brands.

This additional publicity also helps to build your brand awareness and recognition. In turn, this keeps your organization on the forefront of the minds of potential customers, encouraging them to engage with your organization when they find themselves evaluating options.

To build a strong backlink profile, you want to engage in a positive backlink strategy. You want to cultivate links from solid sites within your industry and customer demographic. Links that come from sites with poor practices and bad reputations will not provide your site with an advantage. Although you can disavow these links, all site owners should do what they can to prevent their sites from being associated with unsavory sites.

Cultivating a backlink strategy can help you build the backlinks you want to see from your site. Here is what you need to know.

Why is a backlink strategy important?

A content-driven backlink strategy is important because it encourages your brand to focus on thought leadership and building a positive reputation within your online space. It allows for more natural backlink building, encouraging people to view your business in a positive light. 

By focusing on using strong content to build a backlink strategy, your brand name becomes associated with positive situations. You begin to cultivate your reputation across the digital space in a variety of different channels and publications. This will result in a big impact on your SEO results.

3 proven tactics for building a content-driven backlink strategy

• Surveys
• Research
• Newsjacking

1) Surveys

Conducting surveys builds insight into your customers and their individual needs. You gain a better understanding of the customers your organization targets and what they think. You will learn more about their pain points and the obstacles they face as they work to improve these situations.

As you get to know your customers better, your marketing becomes more powerful. You can speak more directly to these targeted customers with material specifically aimed at their needs. This helps you create more targeted content and engage your readership. The content you create will be more likely to spread across multiple channels and entice people to link to it.

Additionally, taking surveys lets customers know that you care about them and their experiences. They begin to trust your organization more to address their needs and place them first. This also enhances your reputation, encouraging people to read and share your material.

Finally the results of your survey can provide content for publishing and PR coverage. You can share the insights you gain with others in your industry. As you drive interest in these results, you will naturally create opportunities for people to link back to your original results and commentary. 

2) Research

Research provides you with excellent opportunities to add original and helpful knowledge to your industry and niche. You have the chance to provide something of immediate value for your field. This encourages others to look to your research and results and create their own content and backlink strategy that incorporates the findings. As people call upon your research in their own content, you will build helpful SEO backlinks. You will also build your reputation as a thought leader, which encourages other people to look to you for ideas and insight. 

As you publish research and new insights for your field, you also present yourself with excellent opportunities for backlink-rich PR and publishing in industry publications. You can create releases on reputable websites that let people know about your interesting results. You can also find opportunities to write about your research and your thoughts on the results for various industry publications.

Altogether, these opportunities with the research present many opportunities for people to link back to your original results, while your name and reputation grow across these different channels.

3) Newsjacking

People today have become accustomed to news on a nearly instantaneous level. Thanks to social media and the 24-hour news cycle people expect to remain regularly updated on what happens near them and around the world. The people interested in your business and industry have also begun to expect regular updates regarding the latest events and developments of interest.

Newsjacking provides you with a great opportunity to become a trusted news source for potential customers. When you are one of the first to break the latest news in your niche, customers and others in the industry begin to see you as someone they can rely on to always have the latest insights. This will help your backlink strategy as people trust your opinion and use your insight to inform their own opinions on the latest developments in the field.

Your brand will become a trusted place to receive news and learn the latest in the industry. You will become an authoritative source of information, which encourages attention and therefore regular linking. It will become easier to tap into the needs of your customers and encourage them to look to you for information.

You can use the news cycle to incorporate the latest developments with your new research and new data you can surface about the industry. This provides you with greater opportunities for thought leadership and engagement.

Backlinks provide your site with a wide range of benefits, including the ability to drive traffic, build a reputation, and help to increase the ranking of a particular page on the SERP. By calling upon a content-driven backlink strategy, you will earn high-quality backlinks through natural means that enhance your site and help to build your business. Use the backlink strategy above to start encouraging other brands to start linking back to your organization.

Why do you need optimized images?

Page speed, performance, user experience, and mobile to name just a few:

Heavy images slow down your site, plain and simple. And speed is very good for SEO. Customers expect website pages to load nearly instantly. In fact, 53 percent of customers will click off mobile sites that do not load in just 3 seconds. Losing this traffic will result in fewer leads and less revenue for your site.

Not only do people become more inclined to click off a site that does not load quickly, but slow loading can also impact your site’s SEO ranking. Google measures site speed when it crawls your page and rewards faster sites with better rank. Fast-loading sites will have less bounce, which is also a ranking criteria. Earning a higher slot in the SERP will attract more visitors and thus more leads.

There is a technique to optimizing images and we wanted to dive in to take a closer look at the technical aspects of optimizing images and how to improve your site load speed without neglecting the visual impact of your website.

Understanding the image size

There are a few different factors that will impact the weight of your image file. The first is the image resolution, measured by ppi or dpi. Image resolution refers to the number of pixels contained within an image, impacting its clarity. Lower resolution images could appear blurry or distorted while high resolution images will appear crisp and clear, but can be very heavy. You will need to balance the two when optimizing images.

Then you have the image dimensions, which is simply the length and width of the image. This is often measured in pixels, centimeters or inches. Both of these factors contribute to the weight of the image or the overall file size.

You want to keep the image file size as small as you can without compromising the quality. In other words, do not use a high-resolution image when a low-resolution will do. The smaller the size of the image, the easier and faster browsers can open the web page.

Generally speaking, you want to try and keep large or full page images between 80-100 KB and smaller, individual images below 20-30 KB when possible. While optimizing images, size it to the target size before you upload to your content management system.

When determining the proper size of the image, you need to consider the size the image will appear on the screen for users. If you expand an image above its native size, it will usually deteriorate and become blurry. If you shrink an image from its native size it will usually look right but will carry extra weight.

What is image compression and how do you do it for SEO?

As you begin to edit the size of your image files you will come across different options to compress them. There are two different systems available for optimizing images: lossless compression and lossy compression.

Lossless compression refers to the technique that maintains the data in the file. If you have a high-quality image, this compression form can help protect the integrity of the file and ensure that the image appears crisp and clear on the website. On the other hand, this compression system does not do much to reduce the file size, which means that it will not benefit your site tremendously when it comes to reducing file size and improving your loading speed.

Lossy compression, however, refers to compression that helps to reduce the image size by removing some of the data in the file. When the image is loaded, it is created using approximations of the original data. In most situations, people viewing the file will not notice a difference. Since some of the data is removed from the original file, it does help to reduce the size of the file and improving loading speed.

As you optimize your images, you will need to choose the compression system that best fits the image you have and the role it plays on your site.

What type of image file is best for speed and SEO?

In addition to selecting a compression format, the size of your image is also impacted by the type of image file you use. The type of image you have will impact your decision here as well. For example, images that have a lot of solid colors, such as logos or brand icons, should generally be created with GIF, which requires less space and time to load. On the other hand, if you have original photographs on your website, JPG will generally work best as it offers the highest quality for photographs.

Generally, use GIF for simple graphics and anything else that is low resolution. This style has a small file size but only offers 256 colors.

JPG can be used for a variety of different types of images and usually has a smaller file size, but if the image is reduced, it can easily get distorted.

PNG files can also work with a variety of types of images, but the file sizes generally run larger than JPEG or GIF images. PNG is a vector format, so it scales to different size, for example responsive mobile without visual degradation.

Consider the role of the images on your site and consult with your web developers when deciding the type of image file that will fit best.

Optimizing images with alt text

Alt text is a phrase you can use while optimizing images that will display even when the image does not. Alt text is good to make your site compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act as it will, for example, enable blind users using a text-to-audio solution to understand what images are on the page. Alt text will also help the images show up in Google Images.

Optimizing images with keywords in the file name

Adding keywords to the image file name will also provide Google Images another signal about what the image is. For example, waterfall.jpg or brightedge_logo.png, or climbing-shoes.gif. There is no preference for hyphens or underscores, but use one or the other to make the keyword clear.

Helpful resources that can make it easy for brands get the most out of their images

As you begin to optimizing images, you will find a number of different online tools, software and plugins that you can use to help you get the best use out of your images. You will be able to modify the image size and ensure that the image you put on your site is fully optimized and ready for visitors to load. Common tools and plugins include Adobe Creative Suite, ShortPixel and ezgif.com to name a few.

Do images need to be secure and served from HTTPs?

Site security and integrity is extremely important to Google, so the page and all the elements and resources on the page need to be stored and served from a secure server. If you serve a secure page with insecure elements within it, starting Jan 2020, Google may deliver a warning from Chrome that the page includes insecure content.

Speed, Images, and SEO

When it comes to image SEO, no site can overlook the importance of page loading speed. This can be a challenge to balance. Site owners also often hear about the importance of great visuals on their page to attract the attention of users.

Optimizing images, however, can help you create a visually appealing site without slowing down the site with large image files. The better you understand the image file types, how to choose a resolution, and the tools you have to help you with the process, the easier it will be to create a site that is ready for the modern consumer and the Google algorithm.

Get started optimizing images and the rest of your content with BrightEdge!

Recent Google algorithm updates have made it clear that Google is evolving what it means to be relevant. Sites that used to rank at the top for years have increasingly found themselves down a few places and losing traffic.

What is natural language processing for search queries?

It’s generally understood that Google is not a keyword-based search engine anymore. Google is matching natural language questions to answers.

This is what Google said in 2018 (The Evolution of Search) :

“Techniques such as ‘neural embeddings’ help us understand the underlying concepts that people are searching for without relying on the specific words used… As Search enters its next phase of development, there are two trends that will have a significant impact on consumer behavior: more conversational queries and visual searches.”

Google’s been working on natural language, or conversational search, since at least 2013. Conversational search is about understanding what users mean, particularly when users speak their queries.

Google recently stated that the most profound change in search for the past five years was the 2019 introduction of the BERT algorithm.

“…we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”

BERT improves how Google understands natural language search queries that are types or spoken as questions or requests.

• “Google, how do I ____?”
• “Google, where can I purchase ____?”

Does Google do anything similar with web pages?

Google recently published a research paper that discusses training machines to read a web page in natural language like a user who is searching for answers. The research paper is namedNatural Questions: a New Corpus and Challenge for Question Answering Research

The purpose of the research was to create a question and answering data set in order to train a machine in how to find answers on a web page. This means it’s about creating a system that will help train a machine so that instead of scanning a page for keywords, Google is scanning a page and looking for answers.

The research paper describes that part of the task like this:

“Open-domain question answering (QA) is a benchmark task in natural language understanding (NLU) that aims to emulate how people look for information, finding answers to questions by reading and understanding entire documents.

Given a question expressed in natural language (“Why is the sky blue?”), a QA system should be able to read the web… and return the correct answer, even if the answer is somewhat complicated and long.”

There are many more research papers about natural language processing. If you want to learn more, read the excellent overview published by Stanford University that can inform on current directions in information retrieval.

Is Google Using Natural Language Processing for Content?

Google rarely discusses the technologies in use, and when it does it’s after they’ve been in use for months and even years. What we do know is that Google has used a technology they call RankBrain since 2016.

RankBrain is an AI-based system that matches words on a web page to concepts.

Regardless of which technology Google is currently using, it is clear that it’s matching natural language and far beyond simple keyword matching between search queries and web page content.

How to Be Relevant for Natural Language Search Queries?

Creating content used to be about talking around and about the targeted keywords. The meaning of being relevant for natural language today is more about understanding what a user is trying to accomplish when they are searching and then writing content that accurately addresses what the user is trying to do.

While using every word in the targeted keyword phrase is still largely important, it’s not necessary to salt every heading tag with the phrase. In fact, many sites rank at the top of the search results despite not using keyword phrases in the headings.

Nevertheless, it’s generally important to use the entity (person, place, or thing) that is the subject of the keyword phrase. If the search query is “How to drive a car” then using the word “car” is important.

For example, the top two ranked pages for the search queries “how to drive a car” and “learn to drive a car” are usually the same two sites. Change the entity from car to the synonym “auto” and the top site (WikiHow) remains as number one, even though the word “auto” does not exist on that page.

The takeaway there is that this one page successfully answers the query for someone who wants to learn how to drive a car and often any synonyms for the entity, car.

The Value of Knowing When to Stop Writing

As a hypothetical example, suppose your target keyword phrase is “how to drive a car” and the word “truck” makes it into the article. The search result for the “truck” variant is about learning how to drive a commercial truck. The consequence of adding the word “truck” into an article that’s really about “car” could result in the meaning of the page losing focus.

Use as many words as necessary to answer the question. Don’t feel as if you need to keep writing in order to hit some magical word count.

Article Focus is Important

Losing focus is a common reason why some sites lose rankings or fail to achieve rankings altogether. The lesson here in terms of relevance is to understand when the content is losing focus. If the web page is about television set reviews, there is no reason to digress into a discussion of your favorite TV show from the 1990s. Something as small as that can be enough to push the meaning of the page out of focus.

Web Pages Have a Purpose

Google has published a Search Quality Raters Guideline for use by third- party raters whose job is to evaluate the success of new algorithms. The guidelines do not provide clues of how Google’s algorithms work. However they do give insights into what is important for creating a quality web page.

In section 2.4.1 the guidelines states that main content can be text, images, videos, page features, like widgets and calculators as well as user-generated content. But what’s really important is how Google instructs that all of these features are important because they help the page “achieve its purpose.”

“Main Content is any part of the page that directly helps the page achieve its purpose… MC can be text, images, videos, page features (e.g., calculators, games), or it can be user-generated content, such as videos, reviews, articles, etc. that users have added or uploaded to the page.”

When creating a web page, think about what the purpose of that page is. Then compare that to the keyword phrase you want to rank for. Does the purpose of the page match up exactly with the need expressed in the users’ search query?

Aligning the purpose of a web page so that it serves the user who is making the search query is how to define relevance today.

Serve the Users

Section 12.0 of the quality raters guidelines defines the needs of mobile users in terms of “I want to…”

What that means is that natural language search queries can be seen as help for accomplishing tasks.

That’s Google asking the quality raters to judge a page for relevance by judging if the page helps users complete the tasks that are indicated by the search query.

Let the Search Results be Your Guide

Always let the search results tell you what Google wants. In a hypothetical example, if the top three ranked sites avoid the use of jargon but the next three use technical jargon, it’s possible that Google is showing the top three because they are appropriate for newbies. Also, that Google is showing the next three jargon-filled pages because they are appropriate for advanced users.

What that means is that in that hypothetical search query, most of the users are newbies but a considerable but lesser amount are advanced users. In terms of creating content, if you want to rank at the top then write for the majority of users, which in this hypothetical case means newbie users.

This is what Google’s SEO starter guide recommends:

“Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic.”

That information will determine whether Google will rank an advanced web page or a page that focuses on newbies at the top.

Google also comments that finding the information should be easy and fast:

“Users want results right away, at that moment, and may not be able to spend a lot of time to find what they are looking for.”

Giving users the information they want in a fast manner is important for being relevant for natural language queries. One of the most common errors seen is writing a preamble or introductory paragraph. One or two sentences describing the problem and the answer is enough. Anything else is rambling and that tends to make a page less relevant and rank lower, if at all.

Images Communicate Your Relevance

In a 2010 research paper, Google’s scientists discovered that thumbnail images communicated information about the web page that was not available in title and page snippet text.

Perhaps more importantly, thumbnail images that communicated what the topic was about when displayed together with text caused users to make better decisions about which web page was best for them.

“Our results show that thumbnails add information about the relevance of web pages that is not available in the textual summaries of web pages (title, snippet, and URL).

…the best performance was obtained by combining sufficiently large thumbnails (at least 200×200 pixels) with page titles and URLs – and it was better to make users focus primarily on the thumbnail by placing the title and URL below the thumbnail.”

The above research study does not mean that adding a “relevant” image will help you rank better. But it does demonstrate the value of using images that are relevant to the meaning of your web page.

Takeaways:

People who use search engines are constantly changing how they search, changing what they search for, and the reasons for searching are also constantly evolving.

Understanding what users want to accomplish gives your content its purpose. Everything that contributes to serving that purpose is relevant. Everything that does not contribute to serving that purpose is not relevant.

The definition of the word “query” is a question (noun) and to ask a question (verb). Today more than ever, being relevant for a search query means providing the answer to a question.