Topic n. A subject or theme of a webpage, section, or site.
Several SEOs have recently written about topic modeling and advanced on-page optimization. A few of note:
- Rand Fishkin’s What SEOs Need to Know About Topic Modeling & Semantic Connectivity
- Bill Sebald’s How To Work Relationships and Concepts Into Your Copy
- My own More than Keywords: 7 Advanced Concepts of On-page SEO
The concepts themselves are dizzying: LDA, co-occurrence, and entity salience, to name only a few. The question is“How can I easily incorporate these techniques into my content for higher rankings?”
In fact, you can create optimized pages without understanding complex algorithms. Sites like Wikipedia, IMDB, and Amazon create highly optimized, topic-focused pages almost by default. Utilizing these best practices works exactly the same when you’re creating your own content.
The purpose of this post is to provide a simple framework for on-page topic targeting in a way that makes optimizing easy and scalable while producing richer content for your audience.
1. Keywords and relationships
No matter what topic modeling technique you choose, all rely on discovering relationships between words and phrases. As content creators, how we organize words on a page greatly influences how search engines determine the on-page topics.
When we use keywords phrases, search engines hunt for other phrases and concepts that relate to one another. So our first job is to expand our keywords research to incorporate these related phrases and concepts. Contextually rich content includes:
- Close variants and synonyms: Includes abbreviations, plurals, and phrases that mean the same thing.
- Primary related keywords: Words and phrases that relate to the main keyword phrase.
- Secondary related keywords: Words and phrases that relate to the primary related keywords.
- Entity relationships: Concept that describe the properties and relationships between people, places, and things.
Illustrated Guide to Advanced On-Page Topic Targeting for SEO
