If your SEO strategy is good and if it has been correctly applied, then you should see a good positioning of your pages on the queries you have targeted.

However, even with a very good ranking in the search results, not all users will click on your link. Your traffic potential then depends on your click rate.

Let’s see in more detail what the click-through rate is, why it is crucial to improve it and how to do it very simply!

Definition and calculation of the click-through rate
You can find the click-through rate under the acronym TDC or more often in its English version CTR for Click Through Rate.

The click-through rate when talking about SEO is the ratio between :

the number of times a page has been proposed in the search results (= number of impressions)
the number of times it has been clicked (= number of clicks).
This is independent of whether your page is displayed on page 1 or 250.

CTR = (number of clicks / number of impressions) x 100
Let’s take a concrete example:

You have a page that talks about the best folding electric bikes.

It generated 40,000 impressions last month, all queries combined (“folding electric bikes”, “folding bike reviews”, “best electric bikes”…)

In the same period of time, this page was clicked 800 times in total on these queries.

So your click-through rate is : (800 / 40 000) x 100 = 2%

You can also calculate a click rate per query to refine your performance indicators.

If we take the same example:

Last month on the query “folding bike reviews” your page generated 2,500 impressions for 80 clicks.

So your CTR on this query is (80 / 2 500) x 100 = 3.2%.

The click rate is used in many other cases and is calculated in the same way. You will have to replace the number of impressions in the search results by the variable that interests you.

For example, we can calculate the CTR of a Google Ads campaign by calculating the number of displays of the ad compared to the number of clicks generated.

On your website, the click rate of your call-to-actions will be the ratio between the number of views of the page and the number of clicks on the CTA.

That’s why you should never stop taking actions to improve your ranking, even once you are on the first page. If gaining places will boost your traffic, on the contrary, losing them to your competitors will make you lose many visitors!

The gains at the bottom of the page are relatively low, but once you’re past the 8th position, each progression becomes very interesting!

If it was still not the case, these figures should convince you to optimize your referencing well to trump the first places on the Google results!

These figures are still averages. Sometimes, even with an excellent positioning, your CTR will be lower than expected.

So let’s see how to solve this problem to get the most out of your ranking on Google by improving your click-through rate!

How to improve your click-through rate?
As I said, a good positioning does not always ensure an optimal click rate. Why not? Because your link is not highlighted enough in the search results. It does not encourage users to click.

We won’t talk about structured data here, which allows you to obtain enriched results that offer a better visibility to the results (stars, ratings, prices, etc.). This part will be covered in a separate article, as it requires more technical mastery.

We will focus here on the two major elements that impact your click-through rate: the title tag and the metadescription.

And moreover, it’s very easy to optimize!

What is the title tag?
The title tag is the title of your page as you want it to appear on Google.

Its content may or may not be different from the title of the H1 tag of the page. In any case, it is necessary to fill both.

Update: Google has evolved its way of dealing with Title tags and reserves the right to change it to make it more relevant to the user’s query.

It is also the content of the title tag that is displayed as a title in the active tabs of your browser.

On CMS like WordPress, the tag can be easily filled in with the classic page editor, or with plugins like All in One SEO or Yoast SEO.

What is the metadescription?
The metadescription is the short text that is displayed below the title tag. It is only displayed here.

It is modified in the same place as the title tag, whether you use the classic editor of your CMS or a plugin.

In some cases, Google can automatically change your meta description to better match certain queries typed by users. An excerpt of your article integrating the query will then be used temporarily as a metadescription.

In case you forgot to fill in the metadescription tag, Google will do the same and generate one for you.

5 tips to optimize the click-through rate of your title tag
Do not exceed 60 characters
Google displays about 60 characters for the title tag in its search results. Beyond this limit, your title is likely to be truncated!

According to the same study as in the previous section: titles between 15 and 40 characters have an 8.6% higher click-through rate than others.

Include numbers
Headlines containing numbers have better CTRs!

Examples:

5 tips for (…)
Top 10 best (…)
3 reasons to choose (…)
Add a date
If you offer content for which the release date is important, remember to specify it in the title tag.

Examples:

The 2021 guide to (…)
Study : The 2021 guide to (…)
Use action verbs
Your title tag should push web users to action. Using “power words” increases your click-through rate by an average of 13.9%.

Examples:

Discover the ranking of the most popular (…)
Download the guide on how to (…)
Improve your marketing (…)
Turn it into a question
Headlines in the form of questions generate 14.1% more clicks.

Examples:

Discover the ranking of (…)
Download the guide to (…)
Improve your website
Buy a new website (…)
Of course, you can combine these tips to create even more striking titles! And as we don’t forget SEO, don’t forget to include your main keyword in your title tag!

And what about optimizing the meta description in all this?
For the metadescription, there are far fewer rules.

The main thing to remember is that about 160 characters will be displayed on the results page. Beyond that, your text will be truncated and suspension points will appear.

In itself, exceeding this limit is not serious. The excess text will simply not be read by Internet users.

Contrary to a persistent SEO myth, it has been proven that the meta description has little or no weight in your SEO.

Its only interest is to help incite clicks.

For this, it is recommended to write it as a teaser with an action verb that encourages the click while reassuring the user on what he will find on the page.

Write it as you would write an advertising teaser or a post on social networks for example!

Have you ever spent hours creating and writing the perfect content, only to find that it doesn’t rank at all on the expected keywords?

We have.

But why?

The most likely answer is that the keywords you have chosen do not match the search intent of the user.

What is search intent in SEO?
Search intent can be defined as the main objective of a user who has typed a query on Google.

Let’s take an example:

If I type “best electric bikes Rouen”, my search intention is different from the query “convert electric bike Rouen” or “electric bike subscription Rouen”.

I don’t have the same objective on these 3 requests and the pages that will be proposed to me by Google will be very different for each one.

However, they are all on the same theme (the electric bike) and even have the keyword “electric bike Rouen” in common.

In this example, the intention of the first query is a need to select and compare different models before buying. In the second one, we want to know how to transform a standard bike into an electric bike. And for the last one, we’re more interested in renting.

If you write content focusing only on your keywords without taking into account the search intent you want to answer, you will negatively impact your SEO.

Let’s see why in this second part!

Why is search intent so important in SEO?
Because you are going Google’s way
Let’s think about it. What is Google’s goal?

If you’re a marketer like me, you’ll tell me that it’s to make our lives more complicated by making us all play a game without giving us the rules that go with it.

But for the average person, Google is above all a tool that allows you to get a reliable answer with a minimum of effort.

And if Google is where it is today, it’s because it has always focused on this objective: to offer the best answer to any query.

As the algorithm has evolved, it has become more and more efficient.

In the early days of SEO, it was enough to simply stuff a page with a ton of keywords to get to the top positions.

All that has changed, and Google is still analyzing more finely websites and pages to decide their positioning on a query.

To improve its positioning in search engines
If a user launches a search but doesn’t click on any of the results, and then launches a new search, then Google understands that the search intent is not satisfied and this is a failure for it.

As Google does not like to make mistakes, it will tend to stop proposing results that do not generate clicks if a certain number of users reproduce the behavior on similar queries.

In the same way, it will be able to judge the relevance of your page to a query if your page generates clicks on the results pages. This is called the CTR or click-through rate. The higher it is, the better the signals will be.

But that’s not all! Once on your page, the behavior of the user will also have an impact. If the person leaves the page without taking any action (called a bounce) and then looks at another result, then Google will also consider that the search intent has not been fulfilled.

The more time spent and the more pages viewed during a visit, the more favorable the signals are.

It is therefore important not to try at all costs to position yourself on all possible queries for a given keyword, but to target a specific search intention.

In this way, you will greatly reduce the risks that a page sends too many bad signals to Google and that this contributes to degrade its ability to be displayed in good position in the results.

And if your page sends good signals, these are additional opportunities to gain and keep better positions!

The 4 categories of search intent
We usually say that there are 4 types of search intent depending on the queries. But in reality, the same intention can fit into several categories at the same time.

#1 – The informational query
This is the most common type of query. Here the user is looking for information, as the name suggests.

These are mainly queries in the form of basic questions or very broad keywords. For example, there are searches on people, addresses, concepts, etc.

If we place ourselves in the online purchase path, we will be dealing with a prospect in the Awareness or Consideration phases.

Examples of informational queries:
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Release date of the Star Wars Kenobi series
Vaccine operation arn messenger
Address Prefecture Le Havre
…
#2 – The commercial / preferential request
This time, the user is in a commercial process and will try to get information before a potential purchase.

Among these requests, we will have for example requests for comparisons between competing offers, opinions on a product or service or research on the company or the brand.

We can also add all localized searches, even when they do not include brand names or products, such as for example: “utility vehicle rental Bordeaux”.

Here, the querier will be in the Consideration or Decision phase.

Examples of commercial / preferential queries:
Netflix series catalog Disney Plus Amazon Prime
Best sushi in Paris
Avis Macbook Air 2021
Utility vehicle rental Bordeaux
…
#3 – The transactional request
Here we are clearly in the Decision phase.

In this type of query, the person now knows what he or she is looking for and the intention is to find where to make the purchase.

The queries are very precise and generally include the name of a brand or a company. They also include searches for discount offers, or promotions.

Examples of commercial / preferential queries:
Nike Air Force 1 Low Space Jam Sneakers size 44
Best flight prices Paris Tokyo
Coiffeur Lyon Part Dieu
Spotify promo code
…
#4 – The navigational query
This last type of query is totally different from the 3 previous ones.

They are made when the user knows exactly what page he is looking for and it is easier to perform a quick search on Google than to type the direct url or to navigate from page to page on a website.

They are generally not very useful in the purchasing process.

Examples of commercial / preferential queries:
Connection impots
Article SEO SLN The Agency
Order Leclerc Drive
…

Study the search results pages
Now you are allowed to hit the Enter key!

Just like suggestions, when you do a keyword search, you will get the best results (according to Google).

By looking at the pages, articles, or even images and videos that will appear in the search results pages (called SERP in SEO), you will get crucial information.

Remember that if these contents exist and appear on the first page, it is because they are of interest to Google. If we follow what I said above, it is that by extension they respond to search intentions.

It’s up to you! Study the results and deduce the search intents they answer.

You can also directly enter queries for which you already know the main search intent. You may find opportunities to create content on even more specific intents in the results.

Analyze your content performance in Google Search Console
If you are not yet using Google Search Console, do it now!

Like Google Analytics, it’s a tool made available for free by the search engine. It allows you to get a lot of crucial information about the performance of your website on Google.

Among all these features, the one that interests us here is the possibility to know following which requests the visitors arrive on each of your pages.

This information has two major interests on the subject that interests us:

First of all, you will know if your page is well positioned on the queries that you target. You will certainly have surprises at this level.

Secondly, you will be able to identify search intentions that you had not necessarily thought of.

If your page generates a lot of traffic on a certain intention, continue to optimize it in that direction.

On the other hand, it may generate little traffic but high volumes of impressions on other queries. In this case, it is in your interest to create new content based on these intentions.

If there is only one thing you should remember from this article, it is that you should always identify and understand the search intent before optimizing a content. All that’s left is to use the right techniques to write for the web and make sure you offer quality content to perform well on Google!

To go further, check out our complete guide on SEO!

Zombie pages are pages that accumulate SEO problems while having very little success in terms of traffic and conversion.

They are therefore useless and even worse, they will drag your site’s performance down!

Zombie pages are well named!

In the collective imagination, zombies are slow, not really beautiful and they often lack more or less important pieces. They wander around aimlessly and think only of devouring everything that passes within their reach.

Zombie pages are technically poorly optimized, have an often mediocre UX, and lack content, proper markup, etc. They are generally of no interest in the context of the website. They generally have no interest in the buying process or for conversion and therefore consume unnecessary resources (search engine crawl budget and server bandwidth).

Like in the TV series, a zombie here and there is manageable, but a horde is more complicated! Take care of your zombie pages regularly to avoid critical consequences on your SEO!

Why is dealing with zombie pages important for your SEO?
There’s nothing like a concrete example to understand this point!

So let’s do a test together:

How many pages do you think you have on your site? 20? 50? 100? More?

Now, type the query: site:yourdomainname on Google.

You get the number of pages on your site that have actually been indexed by Google!

And here, I am sure you are very surprised by the result for your site!

And yes! We often think that a website is only the home page, the presentation of the company, its offer and the blog articles.

However, Google will index many other pages that sometimes you did not even suspect the existence!

And unfortunately, these pages are often low quality pages that fall into the category of zombie pages.

The most common types of zombie pages
Category pages of your blog posts
Tag pages
Author pages
Search results and pagination pages
…
If you use a CMS like WordPress, these pages are often created automatically. The problem is that if you have not paid attention to the settings of your CMS and/or your theme and plugins, it is possible that you have given Google the opportunity to visit and index these low quality pages.

Apart from pages created and indexed unintentionally, there are also zombie pages such as

Pages with very little content (less than 100 words)
Old news articles or press releases
Old landing pages that are no longer used
Tests or drafts of pages published but never deleted
…

Why Google does not like zombie pages?
As a reminder, it is important to understand that in SEO Google judges a site as a whole.

Each of your pages is obviously treated individually, but in the end it is really the overall quality of your site that will most influence the performance of your SEO.

Do you understand the problem with zombie pages?

If you have too many zombie pages, the performance of all your pages will be impacted.

The higher the ratio of zombie pages to “healthy” pages, the more your site will be judged negatively by Google, and the more complicated it will be to rank your pages in the first positions.

On the contrary, getting rid of zombie pages can have a huge impact on your SEO performance and therefore on your traffic and conversions!

Indeed, Google will be able to focus on fewer pages and optimize the crawl of your site (= detect and index correctly the pages of your site and their updates) and its understanding of your themes and your expertise.

Dealing with zombie pages also allows you to improve the architecture of your site and to keep an optimal tree structure between the different pages of your sites.

It is therefore important to first identify these pages to be able to take the necessary decisions!

How to identify zombie pages on a website?
Ideally we advise you to use SEO tools like RM Tech to easily identify pages that penalize your SEO via their content auditing features.

Be careful! Performing this type of analysis without a dedicated tool is time consuming and requires good SEO knowledge to avoid being counterproductive!

You can still use the “Performance” tab of Google Search Console or Google Analytics to detect your zombie pages manually.

To do this, use the reports to get the list of indexed pages of your site and then analyze those that generate the least traffic.

In order not to modify/delete performing pages, make sure to analyze the traffic over a wide period of at least one year. This way you will be sure not to touch pages that are too new and may not have revealed their full SEO potential yet, or pages that are highly dependent on seasonality.

Once you’ve identified those pages with poor SEO performance, take the time to analyze each of these pages individually. Depending on the page, you can make one or more of the decisions discussed in the next section.

How to deal with zombie pages on a website?
Depending on the case, several solutions can be offered to deal with zombie pages:

#1 – De-index the page
Paging pages or search results pages should not be indexed. Sometimes, due to bad settings on CMS such as WordPress, they can be crawled and then indexed by Google.

It is also possible that some pages on your site are currently indexed and considered zombies, but you need them for reasons unrelated to your SEO.

This may be the case for your article category pages, tags, authors or any other page with too short content, low quality and no interest for your SEO.

For this type of pages, which must remain accessible to Internet users, we advise you to de-index them.

#2 – Optimize or redesign the page
Sometimes it happens that a page becomes a zombie page because it is simply badly optimized.

If it has a real interest in the buying path of your prospects and it does not perform for technical reasons, you can optimize it. It will come out of the zombie category when it starts generating SEO traffic.

To do this, start by identifying the search intent that the page should address.

Then, update and complete the content of that page around that intent, with text, media, and consider internal linking to other related articles.

Similarly, consider adding links on other pages and articles to this page.

Finally, make sure you optimize your title and image tags. This way you will help Google to understand and correctly reference your page.

#3 – Simply delete the page!
This solution is the most drastic but also the most effective to get rid of a zombie page!

If the zombie page really has no SEO potential, nor interest for the user, then it is better to delete it.

But be careful! On a website, you don’t delete a page without making sure you have done a 301 redirect or a 410 link beforehand.

A 301 redirect is the fact of redirecting a page A to a page B. In other words, after a redirect, if you click on a link or type in the url of page A, you will automatically be directed to page B.

Redirects help to avoid generating 404 errors on your website (which are detrimental to SEO). The 301 redirect tells Google that a url is definitely replaced by another one.

In this way, the page will eventually not be visited by Google’s robots and will not be indexed anymore, in favor of the new page.

Think of redirecting the page to be deleted to a page with a content related to that of this page.

If none of your pages meet this criterion, prefer to redirect a 410 code. By doing so, you indicate to Google that this page has been permanently and voluntarily removed.

The prerequisite for connecting Google Search Console is that you are the owner of the site you want to link.

By owner, we mean to have sufficient administrative rights on the site in question.

If you only have editing rights, you will have to go through one of the administrators of your site to do this.

Once on the tool, you will have 2 choices :

Domain : to follow the data on your whole website

URL prefix: to track only certain directories and protocols of your site.

The domain property
The domain URL corresponds to a URL without protocol (http/https) and without defined directory (example: ludosln.net). The prefix “www” is ignored here.

This option will take into account all pages of this property. That is, all subdomains, subpaths and associated protocols.

With the domain property, you will in any case be able to use filters to isolate subdomains, subpaths and protocols in the Google Search Console performance report.

The property with URL prefix
This option allows you to add as many properties as subdomains, subpaths or protocols you want to track.

This way you can have a dedicated view for each sub-section of your site. This can be useful on a multilingual site where you are only in charge of the French part for example.

Unlike domain ownership, here you have to type a complete URL. This means that if you use a URL with the “https” protocol, the pages under the “http” protocol will not be tracked.

How to analyze the performance of your website with Google Search Console?
When you start using Search Console, a major interest is to be able to gauge the performance of your site in terms of natural referencing.

Go to the vertical menu on the left, and select the “Performance” tab.

The key indicators of Google Search Console
The number of impressions of your pages on Google
This number corresponds to the number of times one of your pages was proposed in the Google search results following a query entered by an Internet user.

The number of clicks from Google
This number indicates the number of times one of your pages was clicked (and therefore generated a visit) on a Google search results page.

Average CTR
This indicator is simply the ratio between the number of clicks and the number of impressions. It is the average click-through rate of your pages on the Google search results pages (CTR = Click Through Rate).

The average position
If you know how Google works, then you are familiar with the concept of position. This is the rank at which one of your pages is ranked according to a query from an Internet user. And there you have the average, that’s all.

The secondary tabs
If you look under the main graphs, you will see several tabs. There you will find equally interesting data, especially about the best queries (keywords) on which you are positioned, and the best performing pages.

All this raw information is very interesting, but its potential is multiplied tenfold thanks to the filters available:

Filtering options
Performance tracking offers many filtering options.

Of course, you have the opportunity to choose a date range to analyze.

But you can go further and choose to display these indicators for a specific page or set of pages. Useful for monitoring the most important content for you!

The most interesting filter from an SEO point of view is the query filter. Indeed, it is possible to enter keywords directly and see your performance on them: How many clicks did they bring you? How do you position yourself on them? With which page(s)?

This information is crucial for a good SEO strategy!

If you are a media company, you can even check the performance of your site in Google News. To do this, change the “Search Type” by clicking on the filter to the left of the dates filter.

How to check that a page of my site is indexed with Google Search Console?

The URL inspection tool
Google Search Console allows you to easily ensure that a URL (a page of your website) is well indexed by Google.

To do this, click on “URL Inspection” in the left-hand vertical menu.

You will be prompted to enter a URL in the search bar. Copy and paste the URL of the page you want to analyze.

The first part tells you the status of this URL. You know if your page is indexed, if it is not and why.

The “Coverage” section gives you even more information: When was the page last crawled by a Google bot? Has the page been crawled and indexed?

Finally, before requesting the indexing of the URL you have the opportunity to test it beforehand. This allows you to know if a URL can be indexed by Google and check for potential indexing errors.

The difference with the indexing request is that this test will not necessarily lead to an indexing. It is simply a test of your URL at a defined moment.

Requesting the indexing of the URL
If your page is not indexed, you can even request its indexation directly on the tool by clicking on the button provided for this purpose in the report.

This can be useful for 2 main reasons:

1 – One of your pages has not yet been crawled (visited) by Google’s robots and you want to force its indexing.

2 – You have made changes on your page and you want Google to take them into account by forcing a new crawl of the robots.

Note that you can only perform this action if you have full rights on your Google Search Console account.

In case you want to perform this action on a large number of URLs, you can submit a new sitemap using the dedicated tool in the tab “Index” of the vertical menu.

How to identify errors and problems on my site with Google Search Console?

The coverage report
By going to the “Index” tab in the left-hand menu, then to “Coverage”, you will obtain this report:

It allows you to quickly identify the status of your site in terms of URL quality.

You get the indexing status of all the pages of the selected property.

The 4 possible statuses are :

1 – Coverage errors: these pages have not been indexed
2 – Valid with warning : these pages are indexed but contain problems that may not be intentional
3 – Valid: these pages are indexed
4 – Excluded: these pages have intentionally not been indexed

You can get the details of each status and for each individual URL.

This gives you a complete view of the pages on your site that are not indexed and useful information for taking corrective actions.

Remove a page from indexing
For several reasons, you may need to tell Google that one of your pages should not be indexed.

To do this, there is the “Remove” tool in the “Index” tab.

Simply enter the URL of the page concerned. You can then follow the status of your request.

With Google Search Console you have 2 ways to remove the indexing:

1 – Temporary removal: the URL concerned will no longer be displayed on Google for about 3 months
2 – Obsolete content: to remove a URL that no longer exists on the web and that has not been deindexed on Google

The report on Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals are a set of indicators that allow to evaluate the performance of a website in terms of user experience (UX).

Google Search Console provides you with a dedicated report in the “Experience > Core Web Vitals” tab.

You can identify the fastest URLs and those that are not performing well enough.

If you want to work on the subject more precisely, I recommend you to use another free tool from Google: Page Speed Insight which offers you a much more detailed report.

How to know the internal and external links of my site with Google Search Console?
By clicking on the “Links” tab in the vertical menu, you get the report containing all the links of your website.

Identify the internal links of my site
On this page, Google Search Console gives you the total number of internal links (= links between pages on your own site).

For each page followed in the property, you can know the number of internal links pointing to it.

By clicking on one of the pages, you even get a list of your pages that have an internal link to that page.

Identify the external links of my site
Also on this report, you can see the total number of external links (links to one of your pages from a third party site). Also called “backlinks”, these links are particularly valuable for your SEO.

Just as with internal links, you can easily identify which of your pages get the most external links and from which third-party sites.

The “Top Originating Sites” section gives you the same information, but in reverse. This time, you start from the third party sites to identify which pages on your site are linked to.

Finally, the “Main Anchor Text” section gives you information about which parts of the text on third-party sites are linking to your site.

We know that using Google Search Console can sometimes be complex. However, its data is crucial to a good digital strategy!

As you know, an effective SEO strategy is based on 3 main pillars: working on the content of the website, improving the technical performance and developing its authority.

In this article, we will review all the elements that will allow you to set up an effective link building strategy to work on your natural referencing.

What is link building and why is it important in SEO?
Link building in SEO is the fact of carrying out actions to obtain backlinks.

What is a backlink in SEO ?
A backlink is simply a link from a third party site that points to one of the pages of your site.

Backlinks are important elements to build and develop the authority of your domain (i.e. your website as a whole) for search engines.

The more quality backlinks you have leading to your website, the more Google will consider it as a quality and trusted website.

Why backlinks are important in SEO ?
Before Google’s algorithm became as comprehensive as it is today, the quality of a page was judged solely by its content.

Google then launched its PageRank algorithm which has profoundly changed the way the search engine identifies and ranks web pages.

This evolution added an external dimension to the analysis of the quality of a content. Google now gives an important weight to the number of external links pointing to the pages.

With the Google Penguin update, the analysis is more refined. It is no longer enough to have mass backlinks, but they must be of quality.

This evolution appeared to counter the strategies consisting in artificially creating backlinks by buying or integrating links in mass on sites of low quality.

Finally, for Google a backlink acts in the same way as a recommendation you could get from a third party to legitimize your expertise on a subject.

In SEO, if one of your pages dealing with a specific topic gets a lot of quality backlinks, it will have additional chances to rank ahead of competing pages with fewer or lower quality backlinks.

The issue of obtaining backlinks is therefore an essential component of an effective SEO strategy!

How to identify a quality backlink?
It is crucial to understand what a good link is before launching a link building strategy. Let’s go through the different components of a quality link.

#1 – A quality backlink comes from a page with a strong authority itself.
This first point makes hyper sense when you take the recommendation analogy.

You trust a recommendation from someone with authority in a field more than you trust a review from a stranger (at least I hope).

Google works the same way.

For him, if the page and by extension the site it is part of have themselves a strong authority, then the “power” of backlinks issued is more important.

It is often more interesting to get a single backlink from a site with very high authority than a multitude of backlinks from sites with low authority.

You can easily check the authority of a site (often referred to as domain authority) or a page with online tools like Ahrefs.

You can know the authority score of the url, the domain and the number of backlinks of a page
For Google, quality always matters over quantity when it comes to backlinks.

Worse, you could suffer SEO penalties by getting a lot of backlinks from sites identified by Google as “toxic”. That is to say sites with very low authority, with poor content, poorly optimized technically, not secure …

#2 – A quality backlink comes from a site dealing with a similar theme
The relevance of the third party site to your theme is an important element to qualify a backlink.

That is to say that even if you get a link from a site with high authority, Google could reduce the ” SEO power ” of this backlink.

It’s important to understand that Google will look at what’s happening on the two linked pages to judge whether a backlink is correct or not.

Let’s take an example:

Site A of a vintage guitar manufacturer links to a guitar string supplier site B and to an online music lesson site C.

Here the backlinks obtained by sites B and C are relevant because they are in a related theme.

Let’s analyze this second example:

The site A of an accounting firm links to a site B of a tractor manufacturer and a site C of PC game streaming.

A priori the themes of sites B and C are very different from those of site A. The backlinks obtained will therefore have a low impact on their authority score.

It is therefore crucial to work on your link building strategy around referent sites in similar or related fields.

#3 – A quality backlink is strategically positioned in a page
In your opinion, which backlink will be better perceived by Google: the link placed in one of the first paragraphs of an article or the one placed at the end of the page just above the footer?

You will have understood, when it comes to backlink, everything is important. And the position of this one does not escape it.

Generally speaking, a backlink placed in the body text of a page will have much more value than one that is located in a menu, a footer or in source at the bottom of the page.

This is due to the fact that Google will give more weight to links that are contextualized. That is, links that are included in blocks of text that will give context to it.

Let’s go back to our example of the vintage guitar manufacturer.

If he includes a backlink to the guitar string manufacturer in a block of text on a page where he praises the quality of the strings of his instruments, then this backlink is well contextualized.

On the other hand, if he makes this backlink on a technical description page listing all the suppliers of materials used for the manufacture of his guitars without more context, then the backlink will have much less impact.

Google’s algorithm is sharp enough to understand the difference between an editorial link that serves the subject, to a link placed without real purpose.

#4 – A quality backlink has a good anchor text
The anchor text of a link you talk about?

In fact it is the text that “frames” a link in a block of text.

Good anchor text contextualizes the link. “Click here” or “learn more” are not quality anchor texts. They don’t provide any information to Google to help it qualify the link.

For example, all the links on this page are contextualized by their anchor text. I have integrated links on pieces of text consistent with the page they lead to.

Google will analyze the anchor text, the content of page A and page B. If everything is consistent, the link will be considered as quality.

Beyond the anchor text, Google will also analyze the words and phrases around the link. Here again, the more coherent the link is, the more qualitative it will be.

#5 – A quality backlink has a Dofollow attribute and not Nofollow
There are 2 main link attributes: rel=”nofollow” and rel=”dofollow”.

A nofollow attribute indicates to Google that you do not want it to consult this link. Conversely, the dofollow attribute encourages it to follow it.

In reality, the nofollow attribute will not always prevent Google from consulting the page in question. But from an SEO point of view, the nofollow attribute on a backlink greatly reduces the chances that this link brings you benefits in terms of authority.

Should I buy backlinks?
We should start by saying that buying links is clearly a violation of Google’s guidelines.

From there, you have a good idea of the answer to this question. But I’ll explain why it’s a bad idea.

Why is buying links a bad idea?
First, you should know that buying links is still an extremely common practice.

Why? Because even with the evolutions of the algorithm, Google still has a lot of trouble to accurately detect a paid link from a naturally earned link. Another obvious reason is the difficulty to get these backlinks naturally. It takes a lot of effort whereas buying links brings faster results.

On the other hand, keep in mind that buying links involves negative effects:

By cheating with Google, you expose yourself to significant risks in case of penalties. The game is not necessarily worth the candle.
Generally, paid links are on low-quality sites and on less coherent themes than in the case of links earned naturally.
If a site offers to pay for backlinks, there is a good chance that your competitors have had the same proposal.
If you still want to buy links for reasons other than SEO, remember to ask for the addition of the attribute rel= “nofollow” or rel= “sponsored” to avoid a negative impact on your SEO.

Your site is getting slower and slower? In 90% of the cases it is the fault of your images because they are not sufficiently optimized!

Well, to be honest, it’s mostly your fault

When it comes to embedding an image on a web page, our first reflex is often to upload it and add it as it is.

It’s the laziness that speaks, we all know!

But it’s a pity, because a too heavy and badly optimized image will impact the performance of your website.

So let’s see in this article the best practices to optimize your images for the web!

Why do we need to optimize images on the web?

Yes it’s true that? What’s the point of optimizing your images, it takes time but what’s the benefit?

Well, the main reason is not to harm the natural referencing (SEO) of your site.

SEO is based on 3 main pillars:

The content
The technique
The authority
It is the technical pillar that interests us primarily here.

To summarize, a technically optimized site for SEO is fast, secure and adapted to mobile navigation.

With a fast site, you will satisfy Google’s technical criteria regarding SEO, but you will also improve the UX (user experience).

Because yes, a site that is too slow to load is the best way to lose visitors before they have even read any content on your page!

And UX is not just a funny acronym, it’s a criterion that Google takes more and more into consideration in SEO.

Just look at the trend that the algorithm is taking with the addition of the Core Web Vitals in particular.

And if you still don’t believe me, do the test!

Go to Google Page Speed Insight and copy and paste the url of one of your web pages.

You will get a performance score out of 100 and the reasons why the score is more or less good.

I bet that the main problem of your page is the weight of the images!

To a lesser extent, you can also optimize your images for SEO with the “image alt” tag. But we will come back to this in one of the parts of this article.

The 3 steps to compress an image for the web
Do I lose quality by compressing my image?
First, let’s agree on the terms used. Compressing an image means reducing its weight so that it is as light as possible.

For example, an image that “weighs” 2MB will be reduced to 50KB.

And the answer is no. By compressing using the method described here, you will not lose image quality.

In fact, it is possible to reduce the weight of an image by up to 90% without the difference being noticeable to the naked eye!

#1 – Resize your image to the maximum display size
The very first step is to resize your image to the maximum size it will be displayed on your site.

Let’s take the example of a team photo that you want to include on your company’s presentation page.

You have used your new 400 billion pixel DSLR, and the photo is of very good quality. It is 12000px wide and weighs 25Mb.

If you know that at most it will fit at 600px wide, then resize it to that size. Not one pixel more, it will be useless.

With this step alone, you should be down to an image that is less than 1MB!

It is very important to go through this step first.

Because resizing mathematically decreases the weight of an image exponentially.

For this, you can use recognized tools like Photoshop, or online solutions like Pixlr.

The next step, compression, will be even more effective if the base image is already reduced in size!

#2 – Compress your image using the right tools
The second step is to compress your image.

There are dozens of free online tools to do this efficiently in 2 clicks. For example, you can use :

TinyPNG
Compressor.io
Imagify
…
Nothing complex here. You just have to drag and drop the image to compress and the tool will compress it in a few seconds.

Some of them even offer the possibility to send several images in the queue to save even more time.

This compression step can reduce between 60% and 90% of the weight of the original image.

But that’s not all, you can go even further!

#3 – Use a plugin on your CMS
Are you using a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Shopify, Prestashop, etc?

There are plugins that will automatically compress all the images you upload on your website.

On WordPress, there is for example WP Smush, ReSmush.it, or TinyPNG.

Take a look at the extension library of your CMS and install one you trust.

Most of them have a very handy feature that also allows you to compress images that have already been uploaded to your site without having to re-upload everything by hand.

By working this way, you will get a second compression pass.

It’s also a good way to make sure that no heavy images are uploaded by accident if you have several people embedding content on the site.

BONUS: If you use graphic design tools to create your images
Are you using tools to create your own visuals?

Here again, a few good practices are necessary.

First, as we have seen, remember to create a document with the maximum display dimensions. All tools allow you to do this, and in the worst case, you can resize in a few clicks.

Then, remember to take a good look at the different saving options offered by your tool.

On Photoshop for example, there is a save option dedicated to images used on the web. Simply select “export for web”.

These default settings offer a qualitative rendering of the images for a minimal weight.

And of course, nothing prevents you from going through the 3 steps seen above.

If, like us, you are not a graphic design professional and you use online tools like Canva, be careful!

Even if the tool is dedicated to web content, the images created are not always properly optimized. It is therefore necessary to resize it (this can be done directly on the tool), then go through the compression step.

Which formats should be used for images on the web?
JPEG vs PNG: which is better?
On the web, the most commonly used file formats are JPEG and PNG.

JPEG is an already compressed image format adapted to images broadcast on the web. PNG is much less compressed because it also manages transparency.

Use JPEG by default and reserve PNG for needs that require the use of transparency.

The SVG format: for your simple visuals
You may also know the SVG format. It is dedicated to simple images (icons, pictos, logos…) and has the big advantage of being a vector format.

That is to say that it manages perfectly the automatic resizing following the passage on different screen sizes. Basically, the image is displayed in a clear manner regardless of its size.

If you have the ability to produce these types of visuals in SVG format, do so. They are designed specifically for the web and offer optimal performance.

The WebP format: the new kid on the block
The WebP format is the format recommended by Google himself!

First of all because it was created by Google, but especially because it is much lighter than standard image formats such as PNG and JPEG.

Find out if the CMS you use supports it. Many extensions can help you!

Can we use GIFs on a website?
The GIF format is very often not recommended on web pages. Why not? Because the files are generally heavy and not very optimized.

In reality, you can use them as long as you treat them like any other visual. That is to say, you will have to resize and compress them.

So down with the received ideas, you can integrate GIFs to a page of your website (with parsimony all the same) if you have optimized them before!

How to optimize image tags for SEO?
It is possible to improve your natural referencing thanks to images.

To begin with, you should know that it is possible to reference your images in Google Images. This can be of interest depending on your activity.

Prospects who come across your image and click on it, can become visitors to your site that you will try to convert into leads.

Then, when you upload images to your site, you have the possibility to fill in tags. When properly filled in, they can bring a significant gain to the natural referencing of your page.

The 2 important tags to fill in here are the alternative text tag (or alt image tag) and the image title tag.

How to optimize the image title tag?
Even though the weight of the image title tag seems quite low in SEO, use this opportunity to incorporate your main keyword into the file name.

To be more effective, I recommend naming it after the search intent you want to address with the page it is displayed on.

Avoid using underscores and prefer the single dash, which is better taken into account by search engines.

How to optimize the alt tag of an image for SEO?
The alt tag, also called alt text, is the description you will give of an image in cases where the display does not go as expected.

It is used to replace the image in case of display problem. And it is also the text that will be read by reading aids for visually impaired people for example.

It is therefore very important for the accessibility of content on the web!

But it is also very useful in SEO.

Indeed, Google still has difficulty in deciphering an image alone, especially when it is complex.

The alt tag will therefore help it to understand what the image represents and thus contribute to improving the understanding of your page overall.

There are 3 good practices to keep in mind to optimize the alt tag of your images:

#1 – Stay concise
It is recommended to stay under 125 characters and to go to the point. Here, think of accessibility before SEO!

#2 – Be relevant
Don’t try to fool Google by placing too many keywords, you will pay dearly! So fill in this tag with contextualized content in relation to what you say in the paragraphs surrounding your image.

#3 – Be precise
The alt tag of images must be descriptive. You will have to be as precise as possible to make Google understand what the image is really about.