What is Entity Salience in SEO Terms?

In SEO terms, entity salience is the act or property of a URL which encourages the best possible ranking in natural search results through latent semantic indexing.

That was the short answer, and for some of you that may be all you need to know. For the rest of you…

The detailed answer.

Let’s start from basics. We know that Google looks at your content with a great deal more interest that it did in the past. The algorithms the search engine uses are increasingly sophisticated and one area that this increased power is being used is context.

Entity Salience and Context

Let’s break this down then

• Entity – in this case the entity we are talking about is the URL that you are looking to rank for, specifically the value of the text or multimedia information on it. Though for this we will be sticking with text, the article, blog post or product information for example.
• Salience – Is the gravitas or importance of the entity in question

So what entity salience is in basic terms is “making important content”. How does entity salience apply in digital marketing terms?

Specifically, and perhaps cynically, it is the process of creating and promoting content that is seen as important, citation worthy and shareable in what it expresses.

The problem is, how does Google know your content is important? How will any search engine understand the entity salience of a brand-new article or blog post?

The initial key to unlocking this from an SEO perspective is context, and using our old friend LSI (latent semantic indexing) to leverage Google’s penchant for interesting, engaging content that is credible to the bot that crawls it. This and your own content promotion are what will give your content the push it needs to leverage powerful entity salience.

Embedding Context and Maximising Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Potential

Context is established initially by the use of terminology, phrases and words that are specific or explicit to the topic in question.

For example. Imagine you were writing about puppy training and wanted to rank for puppy training in your area with a local kennel website. Normally a quite competitive niche.

Back in the old “text spam” days, repeating the phrase “puppy training” on your web page repeatedly would be enough. Then, in the early Google era, from about 1999-2000 onwards you needed links to support that. In fact, for a while it was pretty much just about links and nothing else.

Things have changed again. Links, while still vital in competitive niches share the limelight with content. Google’s algorithm now tries to parse your written content and work out whether it is “good or not”. And what Google considers to be good content is contextual and relevant to the topic. Good content strives to achieve a high level of entity salience.

When Google bot crawls your site, it will expect to see several things;

Basic Page Level SEO

The phrase itself in the header, in the URL and probably in the first paragraph. META data mentions might help, but are much less important than they were in the past.

Enough content on the page to explain the topic. Puppy training, although a self-explanatory term is quite a nuanced and personal experience.

It’s not like buying a 60 Watt light bulb. Google understands that products and services are different. Some require more explanation than others. “Puppy training” falls somewhere in the middle in terms of content expectation. I would suggest 500 words minimum for this topic.

Rule 1 of Entity Salience is Knowledge Embedding

“You need enough content to establish credibility to the search engines“

How much content that is depends in large part on the complexity of your product.

I don’t care what Yoast says about 300 words.

You might get away with 100 words for an everyday utility product that people buy with little care or thought for the brand and for simple utility.

300 words might be enough to describe a product that offer more unusual options that require some explanation but within a familiar niche. A car perhaps?

If you are looking to rank for something scientific or academic, then 2000+ words may well be required. If you want to sell a load balancing system for diesel locomotives (which one of my bricks and mortar customers does) then you are going to have to explain quite a bit on your page, like what  “load balancing” means for starters.

Give your readers and the search engines the appropriate amount of content for your niche. If in doubt, see how much content the most successful of your competition has. And do a little more.

Rule 2 of Entity Salience is Word Embedding

“Explain your topic using expected language”

Back to our puppy training example.

If you are writing on this topic Google will expect to see associated keywords and context. In this case words like; Kennel, dog, obedience, leash, house training, sit, beg, treat.

These words and phrases add context. They are expected. In fact you should treat them all as secondary keywords and optimize fort them as such and add them and their long tail partners to your keyword tracking tool.

If you need to know what words are expected then the video at the top of this page explains in short form what entity salience is and one solid repeatable method for researching your content and establishing the best opportunity for your content to reach this level of entity salience

Rule 3 of Entity Salience is Entity Embedding

“Don’t be afraid to add citation”

Entity embedding is a tricky one here. The best way to describe the process in terms of entity salience would be to ensure that you used proper citation for any terms that you did not fully explain in your text.

For instance, with the puppy training example, there are a lot of terms that that require explanation themselves. What is separation anxiety and how does it manifest for example. You could get yourself side-tracked writing a 1200-word addendum to your text just describing that one sub topic.

Better not to do that and to provide a link to an established authority URL on the topic. Now if that link is internal, if you have an existing page on your website that explains the issue, then refer to that.

However, I would still ensure that you provide one or two outbound links as a minimum to none competing authority websites that can elaborate or explain complex sub topics relating to your article. This is an indicator both to Google and to your readers that you have read up and researched the topic and are giving proper citation to your source material.

By all means use the “rel=nofollow” tag on your link if you are concerned about leaking some ranking potential.

How Did We Arrive Here? A History Lesson in Content Ranking Methodology

Back in the dim distant past. Before Google even, when Alta Vista, Lycos and Yahoo were the main search engines and Google did not yet exist, there was SEO. SEO that did not rely on inbound links at all.  What it relied on was, to begin with, seemingly simple. Keyword density.

So, if you wanted to rank for a keyword, you put it on your site as many times as possible. Even hiding it in the borders of your pages with white text on a white background so it couldn’t be seen unless you mouse dragged over.

This was effective from perhaps 1995 through to 1998 or 1999. It is worth bearing in mind that the web was a fraction of the size it was now, and easy to use CMS systems were not available. If you wanted to create a website, you learned HTML, maybe later you bought Dreamweaver, and you coded and adapted hard.

The only way to get a website live was very primitive FTP (file transfer protocol) normally over a modem that uploaded at…under 2k (2 KILOBYTES) a second. So, a small image would often take several minutes to upload.

The point I’m making was, although this method sounds simple. It was behind a substantial knowledge barrier. Just having a website in the first place was very (very) much harder 22 years ago than it is today and the WWW itself was barely 1% of the size it is today.

Many things have been done over the years to make spam website text less effective. Google famously introduced inbound links as the most important ranking factor, of course that was, and is gamed relatively easily in terms of getting raw number of links, so now it is more about the authority of the linking site and the context that surrounds the link itself.

And that’s the key word here

Context.

How Does This Site [insert site here] Rank So Well with Virtually No Content?

A point of clarification. Su proof read my writing most of the time.  She asked some questions about sites that succeed while seemingly not following this rule Specifically short form product focussed web pages that rank highly for both product description and manufacturer / model names and numbers.

This article is about improving your Google ranking position in natural search with content via entity salience. The rules here do not apply well to sites that are “catalogue” pages, product listings or other very short form content normally designed to describe uncomplicated products. This form of website requires a different approach. Normally around specific category level landing pages or “hubs”. That isn’t really the topic of this article.

Good luck. May your entities be salient.