Last week, Google published an official statement about quality links and their effect on your website rankings. In the statement, Google wants to explain their viewpoint on earning quality links.

Google recommends that you do the following to get more links to your website:

1. Get involved in the community around your topic

You should interact and contribute on forums and blogs that are related to your website. Building a good reputation can drive people to your website. If these people like your website, they will link to it.

2. Offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content

This is a no-brainer. The more compelling your website is, the more people will link to it. In addition to unique articles, you can offer useful tools on your website.

3. Solve the problems of your target group

If your website offers solutions to common problems of your target group, your website visitors are likely to link to your site. Publish tutorials or videos on your website or offer practical tools.

Surveys and original research can also attract links. According to Google, both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility.

4. Humor can help

Entertaining content is shared more than ever before. If your website offers something funny (a humorous downtime message, amusing content, etc.), chances are that people will link to your site.

However, these short-lived link-bait tactics usually wear off quickly and they do not contribute much to a long-term linking strategy.

5. Directories help you to get links

According to Google, there are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. However, there are also a lot of low quality directories.

When you submit your website to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Do not bulk-submit your website and make sure that your website will be added to the right category.

6. Avoid spamming methods

Any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation.

Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time.

If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them!

Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results:

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]

We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Will your website rankings drop?

Google’s Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:

“Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ‘We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.’

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.”

While 1% does not sound much, it can be a problem if your website belongs to the pages whose rankings will drop.

At this time, Google’s new site speed signal only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com.

How to keep your web pages listed in Google search results

There are several things that you can do to improve the speed of your web pages:

1.Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host could cause problems.
2.Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
3.Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
4.Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
5.If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
6.Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
7.Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.
The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results.

Page speed is not Google’s most important ranking signal. The end of Google’s page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.

If you advertise your website on Google AdWords, chances are that you found out that you can spend a lot of money on AdWords without getting a lot in return.

The reason why many people spend much more than they have to for their Google AdWords ads is that they use the wrong settings in their campaigns.

Long tail keywords convert better and there are a lot of them

Several studies found out that long tail keywords have a much higher conversion rate than single word keywords. Long tail keywords are very specific keywords that consists of 4 or more words.

According to a recent Hitwise study, more than 18% of searches contain five or more keywords. In addition, Google says that “20% of the queries Google receives each day are ones [they] haven’t seen in at least 90 days, if at all.”

The wrong long tail keywords will just cost you money

The facts above indicate that it might be a good idea to use broad match for all of your keywords. It’s just not possible to include all possible keywords manually in your campaigns. Google recommend to use broad match with your keywords:

“Broad match is a great way to capitalize on those unexpected, but relevant queries. When you include a keyword as a broad match, your corresponding ad is not only eligible to appear alongside queries with that exact spelling, but it can also capture keyword expansions that include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.”

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. If you use broad match for all of your keywords then your ads will be shown for a lot of unrelated searches and you’ll pay a lot of money without getting something in return.

For example, the word “tiger” would be used for searches regarding Tiger Woods, the Siberian tiger, tiger sharks, the town Tiger in Georgia, etc.

For that reason, it is important to exclude the long tail keywords that are not related to your website.

Negative keywords will increase your conversion rate

You can enter so-called negative keywords in your Google AdWords campaigns. If a long tail keyword contains one of your negative keywords, your AdWords ads won’t be displayed.

For example, if you enter “-free” as a negative keyword, your AdWords ad is not displayed if someone searches for free things. Negative keywords are an excellent tool for excluding Internet users looking for free items only.

You can also use negative keywords to display an ad for specific target groups. An insurance broker might want to exclude people who are searching for books about insurance. He could enter “book” and “books” as negative keywords.

If one of your keywords has multiple meanings (“tiger” would trigger “tiger woods” and “siberian tiger”, “tiger shark”, “tiger, georgia”) then you should add negative keywords that remove the unrelated searches.

Broad match can help you to get more customers but you have to be very careful with that option. If you use broad match with your keywords, don’t forget to use negative keywords so that you don’t pay for unwanted traffic.

Google has announced a major change in the way that they handle search results by including synonyms for some words that may be used in queries. How does this affect the position of your web pages in Google’s search results?

Why is it important that Google can deal with synonyms?

Google aims to display the best results for your search. For that reason, it is important that Google’s algorithm understands the words that are used in the search query. An important part of understanding the words is to understand synonyms.

Synonyms are words that can mean the same thing, for example “pictures” and “photos”. People searching for “sunset pictures” are probably also interested in web pages that contain the words “sunset photos”.

A problem is that words that can have different meanings. For example, the word “case” can mean “occurrence”, “instance” or “example”. It can also mean “box” or “container”.

The word “guitar box” might be a synonym for “guitar case” but “O.J. Simpson box” is not a synonym for “O.J. Simpson case”. Google’s measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.

What has changed?

According to the posting in Google’s official blog, Google has improved the way that they detect synonyms. For example, the algorithm can now find 20 possible meanings of the search term “GM”.

GM can mean General Motors, George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm], etc.

Google also made a change to how the synonyms are displayed. The searched words and the synonyms are now displayed in bold in the search results. Web pages that contain only synonyms of the searched word can also be displayed in the search results.

Do you have to change your web pages?

If you optimized your website as explained in previous issues of our newsletter and as explained in our SEO  manual then you don’t have to change anything. Here’s a reminder:

1. Think out of the box.

Don’t just use the technical terms that you use in your company. Think about the words that other people would use to describe your product. For example, don’t just use “rhinoplasty” but also “nose job” and “nose surgery”.

Our keyword research tool will help you to find the best keywords for your website.

2. Optimize different pages of your website for different keywords.

The more pages you optimize, the better. It is much better if one web page is highly relevant to one keyphrase than somewhat relevant to many keyphrases.

Don’t stuff a single page with keywords. The keywords should fit naturally in your web page content. Use our Top 10 Optimizer to find out where on your web pages you should use your keywords.

Different people use different words to find the same things. Use different ways to talk about your website topic and optimize as many pages as possible of your website.

In 2004, Yahoo engineers published a document about TrustRank. TrustRank describes an algorithm that search engines can use to determine relevant search results.

In contrast to the original PageRank algorithm, TrustRank does not solely count the number of links that point to a website but it also considers the authority of a website.

TrustRank was meant to fight spam in the search results

The abstract of the publication shows that PageRank was meant as a way to fight web spam:

“Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam.

We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good [...]

Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.”

Today, all major search engines use some kind of TrustRank

Although Google does not use the official term, most professional search engine optimizers are quite sure that Google and all other major search engines use the same concept to improve the quality of their search results.

That means that it is not enough to get as many links as possible. It is also necessary that your website gets links from the right kind of websites and that search engines trust your site.

How to become a trusted website

There are a few things that you can do to show search engines that your website is trustworthy:

1. Get links from seed sites or from websites that are linked from seed sites

Seed sites are websites that are manually marked as trustworthy by the search engine owners. For example, if Apple.com has been chosen as a seed website by the search engine a link from Apple.com will have a positive effect on the TrustRank of your website.

If Apple.com links to website X, website X links to website Y and website Y links to your website then your website will still get a good TrustRank.

2. Get an old domain name with a good domain history

The older your domain is, the better. If your domain has been online for several years, this is a signal that the website owner is serious about the site and it’s less likely that the domain is used for spamming purposes.

Your domain name should not have changed the owner too often and it should not have been used for many different topics. Of course, it also should not have been used by spammers in the past.

3. Get links from related websites

Does your website get links from related websites and does it link to other related websites? Is your website a lonely island with no links from and to other websites or is it integrated in a network that deals with a special topic?

4. Don’t link to spam websites

You should not link to websites that are known spammers or to websites with dubious quality. If you link to such a website, you show search engines that you support them and that your own website should not be trusted too much.

5. Get many links from social networks

The more often your website is mentioned on social media websites, the more likely it is that your website is a trustworthy high quality website. The more votes your bookmarks on social media sites get, the better.

6. Offer good content and stay away from certain topics

It is not likely that a website that consists of only one page is an authority website. If your website has many pages that contain great content about a special topic then it is much easier to get a good TrustRank.

If your website deals with a special topic, then it’s likely that it never will get a high TrustRank. These topics are the topics for which you receive the most spam emails.