Connect with us

SEO

Content Optimization: The Complete Guide

Published

on

Content Optimization: The Complete Guide

Content optimization helps you get more out of your content efforts, but you don’t necessarily need to make the same optimizations as everyone else. It depends on your goal. 

In this guide, you’ll learn how to optimize content for SEO, conversions, and social shares.

But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page…

What is content optimization?

Content optimization is the process of improving content to ensure it stands the best possible chance of meeting its desired goal. That may be ranking on the first page of Google, increasing social shares, or attracting your best customers.

Why is content optimization important?

Content optimization dramatically improves your content’s performance and helps you meet your marketing goals.

Without it, you miss out on visibility, rankings, traffic, leads, and sales.

The challenge is that the optimization techniques that move the needle forward aren’t always immediately apparent.

For instance, optimizing content for SEO vs. conversions requires two very different approaches. The former involves keyword research, while the latter involves copywriting and a product-led approach.

How to optimize content for SEO

Before you think about attracting email subscribers or leads for your business, you need to start from the top. So let’s look at the different ways you can optimize your content for SEO and get traffic to your site consistently.

1. Make sure you’re targeting a keyword with traffic potential

Optimizing for a keyword that nobody searches for is pointless. Even if you rank #1, you won’t get any traffic.

To identify keywords with high traffic potential, here’s what you should do:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter one or multiple broad keywords related to your topic
  3. Hit Search

For example, when you enter “content marketing” and check the Matching terms report, you’ll get around 26,000 keyword ideas with search volumes, Keyword Difficulty (KD), and other valuable data:

Matching terms report results

To ensure that you’re finding keywords with the potential to attract traffic from organic search, add a minimum Traffic Potential filter. This metric shows the estimated monthly organic traffic to the current top-ranking page, so it’s a reasonable estimate of how much traffic you can get by ranking in pole position. 

Matching terms report results

If your website is new and has low authority, it also pays to filter for low-KD keywords to unearth less competitive topics.

Matching terms report results

Recommended Reading: How to Do Keyword Research for SEO

2. Make sure it aligns with search intent

Unless your content aligns with what searchers are looking for, you’re dead in the water before you start. That’s because Google prioritizes search intent. If your content fails to answer searchers’ questions, this is a signal that your content is a poor match for the query and doesn’t deserve to rank.

The easiest way to understand search intent is to use the current top-ranking results as a proxy. Specifically, you can analyze them for the three Cs of search intent:

  1. Content type – The type of content on the SERPs (e.g., blog post, product page, landing page, category page). If the top 10 positions for your keyword show blog posts, stick to blog posts. Don’t try to shoehorn your product page into the SERPs; it won’t work!
  2. Content format – The content format in the search results (e.g., how-to, step-by-step guide, listicle, review). The top-competing posts will indicate what the searcher predominantly wants to know. If the first page of Google shows listicles, go with a listicle. If it shows guides, go with a guide. You get the idea.
  3. Content angle – The unique selling point of the competing content on the SERPs (e.g., discounts, inexpensive strategies, free shipping). While it’s crucial to stand out from the competition, you should still consider the similarities between top-ranking posts.

For example, if we look at the search results for the keyword “seo tips,” we see that the content type is blog post, the content format is listicle, and the dominant content angle is traffic boosting:

Google SERP for "seo tips"

If you want to stand the best chance of ranking for this query, you should follow suit.

This is what we did with our list of SEO tips.

Recommended Reading: Searcher Intent: The Overlooked ‘Ranking Factor’ You Should Be Optimizing For

3. Make sure it covers everything searchers want to know

Does your post stack up against the competition?

Conduct a content gap analysis to see how you fare. The idea here is to identify potentially missing subtopics that searchers want to know and brainstorm how you can do better.

You can do this quickly by examining the three top-ranking posts most similar to yours (i.e., you may want to ignore that random landing page at the second spot if you’re writing a how-to guide):

  1. Paste the URL of your page into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
  2. Go to the Content Gap tool
  3. Enter the URLs of the top three posts for your keyword
  4. Click Show keywords

For example, if we plug in our guide to guest blogging and a few similar top-ranking pages, one subtopic jumps out right away: a definition.

Content Gap report results

We don’t rank for this because we do not have a definition on our page, so it’d probably be best if we added one.

4. Make sure it’s easy and enticing to read

Most people don’t read webpages from beginning to end. Instead, they scan the main points and pick out phrases that jump at them.

Here are four practical ways to make your content more enticing and easier to skim:

  • Eliminate fluff – Clichés, low-impact adverbs, and hard-to-read sentences repel users. Before publishing your post, use the Hemingway Editor, Grammarly, or ProWritingAid to catch these errors.
  • Increase visual comprehension – Long walls of text overwhelm readers. Use short paragraphs and bullet points (like what we’re doing here), have bold key takeaways, and include relevant images to make your post more reader-friendly.
  • Add a table of contents (ToC) in long posts – The ToC offers easy navigation and tells readers the list of topics covered.
  • Prioritize important information – A well-optimized post makes valuable information accessible. Don’t make readers dig through them! Put your best ideas at the top. Leave the nice-to-know information at the bottom.

You’ll notice that we’re doing many of these things in this post. For example, if you’re reading this on desktop, there should be a floating ToC on the left:

Excerpt of Ahrefs' blog article and ToC on the left

Recommended reading: SEO Copywriting: 12 Easy Tips for Better Content and Higher Rankings

5. Make sure it has a compelling title tag and description

The title tag and meta description is the first thing searchers see on the SERPs.

Ideally, they should describe what your content is about at a glance. It’s a bonus if they set your post apart from competing posts. (This goes back to our point on content angle earlier!)

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when writing them:

  • Match search intent – It should be clear that your page matches what the searcher is looking for from your title tag and meta description alone.
  • Keep them short and sweet – Google truncates title tags and meta descriptions after a certain length. This is usually around 70 characters for title tags and 120 characters for meta descriptions, although it varies.
  • Include your keyword – This helps searchers see at a glance that your page is a relevant match to their search.
  • Highlight specificity – Specific data points increase credibility and respect. Compare “How to Attract Customers in a Month” with “How to Attract 2,738 Customers in a Month on a Shoestring Budget.” Which compels you to click more? 

6. Make sure it has enough backlinks

Backlinks help you get into Google’s good books, as they’re one of the top three ranking factors.

Our search traffic study discovered that the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it attracts. The graph below shows the trend between monthly organic search traffic and the number of backlinks from external websites (referring domains).

Line graph showing the more referring domains, the higher the organic search traffic

So if you want to rank high on the SERPs, you’ll need to build links from authoritative and relevant websites.

Here’s an easy way to find the number of websites that link to your page:

  1. Go to Site Explorer
  2. Enter your page URL
  3. Hit Search

You’ll see the number of referring domains on the Overview report.

Site Explorer overview of Ahrefs' guide to guest blogging

You can then plug your keyword into Keywords Explorer and check the KD score to see if you have anywhere near the estimated number of referring domains needed to rank in the top 10:

Keywords Explorer overview for the term "guest blogging"

If this number is way higher than the number of referring domains to your page, that may be what’s holding you back.

How to optimize content for conversions

SEO may bring you lots of targeted traffic, but that traffic will be useless if your content doesn’t convert. And the trick to doing this is to pair product-focused content with snazzy copywriting skills that pack a punch. So let’s go through how to do that.

1. Make sure it targets a keyword with business potential

The true mark of content marketing success is not ranking on the first page on Google. It’s ranking and attracting a steady stream of leads and sales.

Unfortunately, many businesses create mountains of blog posts without considering the business potential of their keyword or topic.

You’ve probably seen these posts lurking around. They’re often about topics that have nothing to do with the business’s product, and they always end with a pushy call to action (CTA) that serves zero value to the reader.

That’s why it’s crucial to target keywords or topics that align with your product.

Here at Ahrefs, we always consider a keyword’s “business potential” score. The higher it is, the better the opportunity to position our product as an irreplaceable solution to the reader’s problem.

Here’s the scale we use:

Business potential: Table with scores 3 to 0. And explanation of criteria to meet each score.

This brings us to the million-dollar question: How do you position your product as the best solution so that readers will choose you over your competitors?

2. Make sure it shows your product in action

As marketers, our job is only half done if we target keywords with business potential but fail to educate prospects on how our product works. After all, that’s the whole point of choosing topics with high business potential.

But you shouldn’t just tell readers how your product works—you need to show them.

That’s what we’re doing in this post. Notice how we demonstrate how our SEO toolset helps you optimize your content? You’ll probably hit the “X” button if we make a blatant statement like “Ahrefs optimizes your content with a few clicks” without backing it up with proof.

3. Make sure it includes a persuasive call to action

It’s a pity to leave readers hanging after they read a post, especially when it drives massive value.

Include an irresistible CTA to encourage readers to take action toward solving their problems—whether it’s subscribing to an email list, booking a free consultation call, or even something as basic as leaving a question in the comment box. 

What makes a CTA powerful? We boil it down to:

  • Emotion – Conversion-driven CTAs speak to the prospect’s pain or goals and immediately trigger action. Your CTA should make them go, “This company gets me.”
  • Credibility – With trust comes sales. Appeal to skeptical buyers with social proof like specific data, testimonials, and expert endorsements. 
  • Timing – Effective CTAs align where the prospect is in the buyer’s journey. Don’t be afraid to pepper them throughout the post.

Here’s a powerful CTA from Cognitive FX that ticks all the boxes:

CTA about symptoms after a traumatic brain injury

Note how the treatment center adds an empathetic touch to a post about concussion memory loss in its CTA. It also leverages its impressive results (“on average, our patients improve by 75%”) to instill confidence.

Furthermore, look at the strategic placement of the CTAs.

Cognitive FX places them after setting the stage for the patients’ recovery journey, which strikes an emotional chord with readers.

Recommended Reading: RADically Rethink Your CTAs

How to optimize content for social shares

The more people share your post, the more eyeballs it gets. So, in this last section, let’s look at how you can increase exposure on social networks.

1. Make sure it includes expert quotes

Unique quotes from subject matter experts boost distribution.

When you feature a source in your post, odds are they will want to share the post when it gets published. Plus, not only do you bake organic distribution directly into your content, but you also back up your claims without conducting additional research. 

When Fio Dossetto, creator of ContentFolks, was writing a guide on content marketing for Ahrefs, she approached 14 marketing leaders for their insights. Many of these leaders shared the post with their followers after it went live.

Here’s Louis Grenier, founder of Everyone Hates Marketers, sharing it on Twitter:

Fio’s post generated 127 tweets and 161 backlinks as of today.

TIP

Even if the experts you feature have a smaller following, you can still replicate this technique. Databox, a business intelligence platform, tags them on LinkedIn, further amplifying the reach of its posts.

To make this work, you must first identify the right experts.

Even though platforms like HARO connect you with sources, watch out. Most of them are affiliate marketers with irrelevant expertise looking for backlinks.

A better approach is to look for subject matter experts using Ahrefs:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Enter your article’s topic
  3. Click the Authors tab

Identify experts who have written extensively about the topic and have a lot of followers. For example, we may reach out to Jonas Sickler and Caroline Forsey for a quick quote if we’re writing a piece on content marketing examples.

List of authors with corresponding data on Followers and Total Pages

2. Make sure your social share buttons are visible at all times

Given that most readers won’t make it to the end of the post, it’s not an exaggeration to say that they will most likely ignore the social share buttons at the bottom.

This is where sticky share buttons from tools like AddThis and Sumo come in handy.

Since these anchored buttons stay on the screen while the reader scrolls, they’re more likely to notice, click, and share the post.

That’s what we do here at Ahrefs:

Excerpt of Ahrefs' blog article; notably, "social" buttons on the right

Readers can easily share our posts with a click instead of scrolling down to locate the elusive button—or worse, copying and pasting the URL on their social media channels.

Final thoughts

Optimizing content is like using the rocket start technique on Mario Kart. It helps you power up, gain a running start, and get the most out of your content efforts.

Try the tips above to rank higher on the SERPs, increase social shares, and attract your best customers.

Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.




Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

SEO

Mozilla VPN Security Risks Discovered

Published

on

By

Mozilla VPN Security Risks Discovered

Mozilla published the results of a recent third-party security audit of its VPN services as part of it’s commitment to user privacy and security. The survey revealed security issues which were presented to Mozilla to be addressed with fixes to ensure user privacy and security.

Many search marketers use VPNs during the course of their business especially when using a Wi-Fi connection in order to protect sensitive data, so the  trustworthiness of a VNP is essential.

Mozilla VPN

A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is a service that hides (encrypts) a user’s Internet traffic so that no third party (like an ISP) can snoop and see what sites a user is visiting.

VPNs also add a layer of security from malicious activities such as session hijacking which can give an attacker full access to the websites a user is visiting.

There is a high expectation from users that the VPN will protect their privacy when they are browsing on the Internet.

Mozilla thus employs the services of a third party to conduct a security audit to make sure their VPN is thoroughly locked down.

Security Risks Discovered

The audit revealed vulnerabilities of medium or higher severity, ranging from Denial of Service (DoS). risks to keychain access leaks (related to encryption) and the lack of access controls.

Cure53, the third party security firm, discovered and addressed several risks. Among the issues were potential VPN leaks to the vulnerability of a rogue extension that disabled the VPN.

The scope of the audit encompassed the following products:

  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for macOS
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Linux
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Windows
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for iOS
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Androi

These are the risks identified by the security audit:

  • FVP-03-003: DoS via serialized intent
  • FVP-03-008: Keychain access level leaks WG private key to iCloud
  • VP-03-010: VPN leak via captive portal detection
  • FVP-03-011: Lack of local TCP server access controls
  • FVP-03-012: Rogue extension can disable VPN using mozillavpnnp (High)

The rogue extension issue was rated as high severity. Each risk was subsequently addressed by Mozilla.

Mozilla presented the results of the security audit as part of their commitment to transparency and to maintain the trust and security of their users. Conducting a third party security audit is a best practice for a VPN provider that helps assure that the VPN is trustworthy and reliable.

Read Mozilla’s announcement:
Mozilla VPN Security Audit 2023

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Meilun

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

Link Building Outreach for Noobs

Published

on

Link Building Outreach for Noobs

Link outreach is the process of contacting other websites to ask for a backlink to your website.

For example, here’s an outreach email we sent as part of a broken link building campaign:

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get started with link outreach and how to get better results. 

How to do link outreach

Link outreach is a four-step process:

1. Find prospects

No matter how amazing your email is, you won’t get responses if it’s not relevant to the person you’re contacting. This makes finding the right person to contact equally as important as crafting a great email.

Who to reach out to depends on your link building strategy. Here’s a table summarizing who you should find for the following link building tactics:

As a quick example, here’s how you would find sites likely to accept your guest posts:

  1. Go to Content Explorer
  2. Enter a related topic and change the dropdown to “In title”
  3. Filter for English results
  4. Filter for results with 500+ words
  5. Go to the “Websites” tab
Finding guest blogging opportunities via Content ExplorerFinding guest blogging opportunities via Content Explorer

This shows you the websites getting the most search traffic to content about your target topic.

From here, you’d want to look at the Authors column to prioritize sites with multiple authors, as this suggests that they may accept guest posts.

The Authors column indicate how many authors have written for the siteThe Authors column indicate how many authors have written for the site

If you want to learn how to find prospects for different link building tactics, I recommend reading the resource below.

2. Find their contact details

Once you’ve curated a list of people to reach out to, you’ll need to find their contact information.

Typically, this is their email address. The easiest way to find this is to use an email lookup tool like Hunter.io. All you need to do is enter the first name, last name, and domain of your target prospect. Hunter will find their email for you:

Finding Tim's email with Hunter.ioFinding Tim's email with Hunter.io

To prevent tearing your hair from searching for hundreds of emails one-by-one, most email lookup tools allow you to upload a CSV list of names and domains. Hunter also has a Google Sheets add-on to make this even easier.

Using the Hunter for Sheets add-on to find emails in bulk directly in Google SheetsUsing the Hunter for Sheets add-on to find emails in bulk directly in Google Sheets

3. Send a personalized pitch

Knowing who to reach out to is half the battle won. The next ‘battle’ to win is actually getting the person to care.

Think about it. For someone to link to you, the following things need to happen:

  • They must read your email
  • They must be convinced to check out your content
  • They must open the target page and complete all administrative tasks (log in to their CMS, find the link, etc.)
  • They must link to you or swap out links

That’s a lot of steps. Most people don’t care enough to do this. That’s why there’s more to link outreach than just writing the perfect email (I’ll cover this in the next section).

For now, let’s look at how to craft an amazing email. To do that, you need to answer three questions:

  1. Why should they open your email? — The subject line needs to capture attention in a busy inbox.
  2. Why should they read your email? — The body needs to be short and hook the reader in.
  3. Why should they link to you? — Your pitch needs to be compelling: What’s in it for them and why is your content link-worthy?

For example, here’s how we wrote our outreach email based on the three questions:

An analysis of our outreach email based on three questionsAn analysis of our outreach email based on three questions

Here’s another outreach email we wrote, this time for a campaign building links to our content marketing statistics post:

An analysis of our outreach email based on three questionsAn analysis of our outreach email based on three questions

4. Follow up, once

People are busy and their inboxes are crowded. They might have missed your email or read it and forgot.

Solve this by sending a short polite follow-up.

Example follow-up emailExample follow-up email

One is good enough. There’s no need to spam the other person with countless follow-up emails hoping for a different outcome. If they’re not interested, they’re not interested.

Link outreach tips

In theory, link outreach is simply finding the right person and asking them for a link. But there is more to it than that. I’ll explore some additional tips to help improve your outreach.

Don’t over-personalize

Some SEOs swear by the sniper approach to link outreach. That is: Each email is 100% customized to the person you are targeting.

But our experience taught us that over-personalization isn’t better. We ran link-building campaigns that sent hyper-personalized emails and got no results.

It makes logical sense: Most people just don’t do favors for strangers. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen—it does—but rarely will your amazing, hyper-personalized pitch change someone’s mind.

So, don’t spend all your time tweaking your email just to eke out minute gains.

Avoid common templates

My first reaction seeing this email is to delete it:

A bad outreach emailA bad outreach email

Why? Because it’s a template I’ve seen many times in my inbox. And so have many others.

Another reason: Not only did he reference a post I wrote six years ago, it was a guest post, i.e., I do not have control over the site. This shows why finding the right prospects is important. He even got my name wrong.

Templates do work, but bad ones don’t. You can’t expect to copy-paste one from a blog post and hope to achieve success.

A better approach is to use the scoped shotgun approach: use a template but with dynamic variables.

Email outreach template with dynamic variablesEmail outreach template with dynamic variables

You can do this with tools like Pitchbox and Buzzstream.

This can help achieve a decent level of personalization so your email isn’t spammy. But it doesn’t spend all your time writing customized emails for every prospect.

Send lots of emails

When we polled 800+ people on X and LinkedIn about their link outreach results, the average conversion rate was only 1-5%.

Link outreach conversion rates in 2023Link outreach conversion rates in 2023

This is why you need to send more emails. If you run the numbers, it just makes sense:

  • 100 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 1 link
  • 1,000 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 10 links

I’m not saying to spam everyone. But if you want more high-quality links, you need to reach out to more high-quality prospects.

Build a brand

A few years ago, we published a link building case study:

  • 515 outreach emails
  • 17.55% reply rate
  • 5.75% conversion rate

Pretty good results! Except the top comments were about how we only succeeded because of our brand:

Comments on our YouTube video saying we succeeded because of our brandComments on our YouTube video saying we succeeded because of our brand

It’s true; we acknowledge it. But I think the takeaway here isn’t that we should repeat the experiment with an unknown website. The takeaway is that more SEOs should be focused on building a brand.

We’re all humans—we rely on heuristics to make judgments. In this case, it’s branding. If your brand is recognizable, it solves the “stranger” problem—people know you, like you, and are more likely to link.

The question then: How do you build a brand?

I’d like to quote our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Soulo here:

What is a strong brand if not a consistent output of high-quality work that people enjoy? Ahrefs’ content team has been publishing top-notch content for quite a few years on our blog and YouTube channel. Slowly but surely, we were able to reach tens of millions of people and instill the idea that “Ahrefs’ content = quality content”—which now clearly works to our advantage.

Tim SouloTim Soulo

Ahrefs was once unknown, too. So, don’t be disheartened if no one is willing to link to you today. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Trust the process and create incredible content. Show it to people. You’ll build your brand and reputation that way.

Build relationships with people in your industry

Outreach starts before you even ask for a link.

Think about it: People don’t do favors for strangers but they will for friends. If you want to build and maintain relationships in the industry, way before you start any link outreach campaigns.

Don’t just rely on emails either. Direct messages (DMs) on LinkedIn and X, phone calls—they all work. For example, Patrick Stox, our Product Advisor, used to have a list of contacts he regularly reached out to. He’d hop on calls and even send fruit baskets.

Create systems and automations

In its most fundamental form, link outreach is really about finding more people and sending more emails.

Doing this well is all about building systems and automations.

We have a few videos on how to build a team and a link-building system, so I recommend that you check them out.

Final thoughts

Good link outreach is indistinguishable from good business development.

In business development, your chances of success will increase if you:

  • Pitch the right partners
  • Have a strong brand
  • Have prior relationships with them
  • Pitch the right collaboration ideas

The same goes for link outreach. Follow the principles above and you will see more success for your link outreach campaigns.

Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter X.



Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

Published

on

By

Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

Researchers discovered a way to defeat the safety guardrails in GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo, unlocking the ability to generate harmful and toxic content, essentially beating a large language model with another large language model.

The researchers discovered that the use of tree-of-thought (ToT)reasoning to repeat and refine a line of attack was useful for jailbreaking another large language model.

What they found is that the ToT approach was successful against GPT4, GPT4-Turbo, and PaLM-2, using a remarkably low number of queries to obtain a jailbreak, on average less than thirty queries.

Tree Of Thoughts Reasoning

A Google research paper from around May 2022 discovered Chain of Thought Prompting.

Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting strategy used on a generative AI to make it follow a sequence of steps in order to solve a problem and complete a task. The CoT method is often accompanied with examples to show the LLM how the steps work in a reasoning task.

So, rather than just ask a generative AI like Midjourney or ChatGPT to do a task, the chain of thought method instructs the AI how to follow a path of reasoning that’s composed of a series of steps.

Tree of Thoughts (ToT) reasoning, sometimes referred to as Tree of Thought (singular) is essentially a variation and improvement of CoT, but they’re two different things.

Tree of Thoughts reasoning is similar to CoT. The difference is that rather than training a generative AI to follow a single path of reasoning, ToT is built on a process that allows for multiple paths so that the AI can stop and self-assess then come up with alternate steps.

Tree of Thoughts reasoning was developed in May 2023 in a research paper titled Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (PDF)

The research paper describes Tree of Thought:

“…we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving.

ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices.

Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models’ problem-solving abilities…”

Tree Of Attacks With Pruning (TAP)

This new method of jailbreaking large language models is called Tree of Attacks with Pruning, TAP. TAP uses two LLMs, one for attacking and the other for evaluating.

TAP is able to outperform other jailbreaking methods by significant margins, only requiring black-box access to the LLM.

A black box, in computing, is where one can see what goes into an algorithm and what comes out. But what happens in the middle is unknown, thus it’s said to be in a black box.

Tree of thoughts (TAP) reasoning is used against a targeted LLM like GPT-4 to repetitively try different prompting, assess the results, then if necessary change course if that attempt is not promising.

This is called a process of iteration and pruning. Each prompting attempt is analyzed for the probability of success. If the path of attack is judged to be a dead end, the LLM will “prune” that path of attack and begin another and better series of prompting attacks.

This is why it’s called a “tree” in that rather than using a linear process of reasoning which is the hallmark of chain of thought (CoT) prompting, tree of thought prompting is non-linear because the reasoning process branches off to other areas of reasoning, much like a human might do.

The attacker issues a series of prompts, the evaluator evaluates the responses to those prompts and then makes a decision as to what the next path of attack will be by making a call as to whether the current path of attack is irrelevant or not, plus it also evaluates the results to determine the likely success of prompts that have not yet been tried.

What’s remarkable about this approach is that this process reduces the number of prompts needed to jailbreak GPT-4. Additionally, a greater number of jailbreaking prompts are discovered with TAP than with any other jailbreaking method.

The researchers observe:

“In this work, we present Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM.

TAP utilizes an LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts using tree-of-thoughts reasoning until one of the generated prompts jailbreaks the target.

Crucially, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks.

Using tree-of-thought reasoning allows TAP to navigate a large search space of prompts and pruning reduces the total number of queries sent to the target.

In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo) for more than 80% of the prompts using only a small number of queries. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box method for generating jailbreaks.”

Tree Of Thought (ToT) Outperforms Chain Of Thought (CoT) Reasoning

Another interesting conclusion reached in the research paper is that, for this particular task, ToT reasoning outperforms CoT reasoning, even when adding pruning to the CoT method, where off topic prompting is pruned and discarded.

ToT Underperforms With GPT 3.5 Turbo

The researchers discovered that ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo didn’t perform well with CoT, revealing the limitations of GPT 3.5 Turbo. Actually, GPT 3.5 performed exceedingly poorly, dropping from 84% success rate to only a 4.2% success rate.

This is their observation about why GPT 3.5 underperforms:

“We observe that the choice of the evaluator can affect the performance of TAP: changing the attacker from GPT4 to GPT3.5-Turbo reduces the success rate from 84% to 4.2%.

The reason for the reduction in success rate is that GPT3.5-Turbo incorrectly determines that the target model is jailbroken (for the provided goal) and, hence, preemptively stops the method.

As a consequence, the variant sends significantly fewer queries than the original method…”

What This Mean For You

While it’s amusing that the researchers use the ToT method to beat an LLM with another LLM, it also highlights the usefulness of ToT for generating surprising new directions in prompting in order to achieve higher levels of output.

  • TL/DR Takeaways:
  • Tree of Thought prompting outperformed Chain of Thought methods
  • GPT 3.5 worked significantly poorly in comparison to GPT 4 in ToT
  • Pruning is a useful part of a prompting strategy
  • Research showed that ToT is superior to CoT in an intensive reasoning task like jailbreaking an LLM

Read the original research paper:

Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically (PDF)

Featured Image by Shutterstock/THE.STUDIO

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending