Technical Content Optimization
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This document presents an extensive overview of technical content optimization strategies for improving search engine rankings. It emphasizes the necessity of understanding Google's algorithms, the importance of relevant content and quality links, and the evolving nature of keyword intent and entity recognition. The speaker advocates for integrating advanced concepts from natural language processing and computational linguistics into SEO practices to meet search engine expectations effectively.
Technical Content Optimization
- 1. 1 Presented by: Michael King Contact: [email protected] Twitter: @iPullRank Technical Content Optimization @IPULLRANKAGENCY
- 2. 2 No one knows Google’s algorithms. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Disclaimer.
- 3. 3 No one knows Google’s algorithms. Patents are not an indication that something is currently in use. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Disclaimer.
- 4. 4 No one knows Google’s algorithms. Patents are not an indication that something is currently in use. I’m not aiming to offend anyone with this presentation. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Disclaimer.
- 5. 5 Search Engine Expectations How do Search Engines See Content? TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 6. 6 My Hypothesis Just my educated opinion… TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 7. 7 Our Correlation Studies Showcase Our Bias, Not Google’s I believe that because we are biased by the impact of links, we focus heavily on link acquisition. As a result our correlation studies reflect that. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Link Analysis Correlations Text Analysis Correlations
- 8. 8 PageRank PageRank certainly changed the game. However, at its simplest, it is largely just about link volume. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 9. 9 Google Cares About Content Relevance and Parity In addition to the volume of links, the source and target content relevance is examined. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 10. 10 Our Metrics Mostly Measure Volume First, our link metrics are, at best, just approximations. They are not necessarily indicative of anything that Google is actually doing or measuring. Second, our link metrics are mostly some measure of link volume. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 12. 12 Topical PageRank It is not realistic to expect that Google has been using pure PageRank. Rather, it makes way more sense to expect they have defaulted to some form of Topical PageRank for several years. h/t @CyrusShepard TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 13. 13 But we just want the link, no matter what? TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Disclaimer.
- 14. 14 How Content is Understood in Information Retrieval Content is tokenized and then relationships between terms are determined statistically. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 15. 15 Yet The Question is Always How Long Should Content Be? TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 16. 16 How Content is Understood by Google Google has a more sophisticated and living system for doing the same thing. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 17. 17 But we just “make great content?” TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Content.
- 18. 18 Content Scoring and Storing Search engines can score documents based on a variety of features. Google’s file system suggests that they have the capability to store multiple versions of any document over time. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 19. 19 Google’s Scoring Functions There’s more than one scoring function. Google scores content and links a variety of different ways and then chooses the best results. There is not just one “algorithm.” TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 20. 2020 Document Scoring Simplified TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Content Factor Content Factor Speed Factor Link Factor Link Factor Document Score + + + + =
- 21. 2121 Each Component to the Equation Has a Weight TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Content Factor Content Factor Speed Factor Link Factor Link Factor Document Score a b c d e+ + + + =
- 22. 2222 The Weights May Look Like This TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Content Factor Content Factor Speed Factor Link Factor Link Factor Document Score 3 6 1 2 2+ + + + =
- 23. 2323 This is What SEOs Do TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 5 2 4 95 74 Content Factor Content Factor Speed Factor Link Factor Link Factor 1483 6 1 2 2+ + + + =
- 24. 2424 So, Then, Google Turns Down the Weights on Links TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 5 2 4 95 74 Content Factor Content Factor Speed Factor Link Factor Link Factor 55.493 6 1 .25 .01+ + + + =
- 25. 2525 When Really, Content Optimization May Go Further TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 100 100 4 95 74 Content Factor Content Factor Speed Factor Link Factor Link Factor 928.493 6 1 .25 .01+ + + + =
- 26. 26 Google Constantly Evaluates and Experiments TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 27. 27 There is Evidence of CTR Expectations Granted, the screenshot is from the Paid side, but this suggests that Google has at least considered an expected CTR. This is also consistent with the idea of evaluating a successful search based on click activity. The hypothesis being that if a result does not consistently meet the expected CTR, it should be demoted. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 28. 28 But we don’t A/B test our metadata? TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Experiments.
- 29. 29 Queries Become Entities Google has explicitly indicated that they break a query into a series of entities first. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 30. 30 Attributes of Entities Inform Context Google builds context around the query leveraging the information about the entity to inform what documents to consider. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 31. 31 Entities are Extracted From Content to Inform Rankings When Google is processing content, they extract ad score entities. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 32. 32 But our industry doesn’t develop entity strategies? TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Entity Salience.
- 33. 33 Intent for a given keyword can change over time. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Intent.
- 34. 34 Intent for a given keyword can change over time. Yet we set and forget our keyword research? TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Intent.
- 35. 35 Technical Content Optimization is a Multi-dimensional Word Game, but… TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 36. 3636 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION ..we don’t know what we’re doing
- 37. 37 Mind the Text Analysis Knowledge Gap What is missing from the SEO skillset TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 38. 38 We’re Entering Different Fields We are no longer talking about SEO. Rather, we are talking about natural language processing, computational linguistics, information retrieval and graph theory. All things that conceptually underpin the computer science behind how search engines model topics in content. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 39. 39 Natural Language Processing Use Cases TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 40. 40 A “Corpus” is Built from Crawling Googlebot crawls the web and builds a corpus of web documents. This is how the process begins. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 41. 41 Documents are Parsed Documents are broken down into words and then tagged with parts of speech. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 42. 42 Topics are Modeled A series of transformations and analyses are done on the content to understand what they are about. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 43. 43 Language is Understood Once the content is understood, and features are extracted, it can then be scored and used for rankings. This is how search engines develop their expectation of what should be featured in content. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 44. 44 Google Has Something Called BERT BERT is Google’s technique for pre- training NLP for classification, question answering and named entity recognition. https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/open -sourcing-bert-state-of-art-pre.html TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 46. 46 In other words, it’s the thing that does this. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 47. 47 Learn More about BERT (and ELMo) Jay Alammar has a great article with illustrations that walks you through BERT and some of the other pre-existing NLP mechanisms http://jalammar.github.io/illustrated- bert/ TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 48. 48 BERT Q&A Demo Get a preview of what Google might extract from a page for a given question with this BERT demo. https://www.pragnakalp.com/demos/BE RT-NLP-QnA-Demo/ TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 50. 50 Keyword Usage As you might imagine, leveraging Text Statistics to inform rankings indicates that you might want to use the keywords on the page. This is where having the opportunity to rank begins. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 51. 51 Tokenization Search Engines break paragraphs into sentences and sentences into “tokens” or individual words. This better positions content for statistical analysis TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 52. 52 N-grams N-grams are terms or phrases of N- length. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 55. 55 Synonyms and Close Variants Statistical relevance is computed using both synonyms and close variants of words. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 56. 56 Stemming Search Engines break words into their stems to better determine relationships and relevance. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 57. 57 Lemmatization Similar to stemming, lemmatization is the grouping of inflected forms of the same word or idea. For example, “better” and “good” have the same lemma. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 58. 58 Semantic Distance & Term Relationships Search engines look for how physically close words are together to better determine their relationship in statistical models. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 59. 59 Latent Direchlet Allocation LDA is a recursive algorithm for mapping keywords to topics. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 61. 61 Zipf’s Law Zipf’s law is a theory that words will be similarly distributed across documents in the same corpus (or document set). TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 62. 62 Zipf’s Law Applied When run on an actual dataset, zipf’s law tends to hold up in high rankings. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 63. 63 Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency Term frequency, inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) identifies the importance of keywords with respect to other keywords in documents in a corpus. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 65. 65 Phrase-based Indexing & Co-occurence Google Specifically looks for keywords that co-occur with a target keyword in a document set. Usage of those keywords is an indication of relevance for subsequent documents. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 66. 66 But You Heard TF-IDF is Old And You Shouldn’t Focus On it… I actually agree with this, you should not focus on TF-IDF in isolation. I suspect that Google is using a series of text analysis functions to calculate relevance, but the age of the technique does not make it any less valuable. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 67. 67 Heap’s Law Heaps law indicates that vocabulary within a corpus grows at a predictable rate. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 68. 68 Entity Salience Search engines leverage the features of the entity to understand the context in which the entity is referenced. Implicit features of the entity may be used to understand the document. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 69. 69 Hidden Markov Models Hidden Markov Models allow search engines to extract implicit entities. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 70. 70 Entities are Also Used in Verification Google double checks what you’re talking about by using entities. H/t @TomAnthonySEO TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 71. 71 Page Segmentation Modern Search engines determine both prominence of content and review the visual hierarchy to determine how valuable the content is to the page. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 72. 72 Search engines are recursive. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION How it all works.
- 73. 73 We need to understand Google’s statistical expectation of content and add it to our content’s requirements. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION What we’re missing.
- 74. 74 What Should We Be Doing? Let’s Get Actionable TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 75. 75 Step 1 - Research & Create: Create content that fulfills expectations We need to create or optimize content that balances user needs and search engine expectations. This requires researching the query space based on what is currently ranking in Google’s corpus. Step 2 - Build Relevant Links: Build Links with Content Parity Building links needs to be a more detailed process. You need to only queue up link prospects that are topically relevant. These are the links that will propel you further than links from random unrelated content. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Step 3 - Test & Optimize: Measure performance and experiment with metadata You need to continually review the performance of your content against that of the average performance in your space. If you are performing below average, this an opportunity to perform experiments on your metadata.
- 76. 7676 We need to do more of Column B Our industry talks a lot about the concepts in the column B, but in practice we do not have enough SEO tools to facilitate the latter. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 77. 77 It Starts with Keyword Research This cannot be the extent of your keyword research in 2019.
- 78. 7878 Let’s Take it back to 2013 At minimum you should be pulling, keywords, search volume, ranking difficulty, co-occurring keywords, target personas, need states, entities. Check out my Persona-driven Keyword research deck for how to pull most of this. https://www.slideshare.net/ipullrank/per sona-driven-keyword-research/
- 79. 79 The ultimate goal is to determine a series of co-occurring terms and entities to incorporate into your content for each target keyword. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION The goal.
- 81. 81 Knime Allows for Drag & Drop Text Analysis More than just text analysis, Knime has a series of features for. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 84. 84 Download a “Corpus” for a Keyword Ideally, we’d review all of the results for a given keyword to achieve parity with Google, but in this case we’ll download the top 100 results for “seo tools” from SEMRush. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 85. 85 Here’s a Starter Workflow This workflow allows you to get started with LDA and computes Term Frequency. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 86. 8686 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 1. Put your domain into SEMRush.
- 87. 8787 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 2. See what you don’t rank well for in organic research.
- 88. 8888 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 3. Pick a keyword.
- 89. 8989 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 4. Look at the SERP.
- 91. 9191
- 92. 9292 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION This is the page that ranks #86?!
- 93. 9393 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 5. See what else could rank for our site.
- 95. 9595 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 6. Put in the keyword and compare TF-IDF to ranking pages.
- 96. 9696 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION You can see the corpus they pulled for review.
- 97. 9797 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION 7. Put the copy in. See what important keywords are missing and make edits.
- 98. 9898 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Content Optimization implemented Content Optimization implemented Results with no Link Building (Competitive Medicare Terms Min MSV 8100)
- 99. 9999 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION Results with No Link Building (Competitive Medicare Terms Min MSV 8100) Content Optimization implemented
- 101. 101101 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION The topic explorer helps you identify semantically clustered keyword opps.
- 102. 102102 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION You can generate a new page around the core topics.
- 103. 103103 TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION It abstracts a lot of the topic modeling and gives you detailed direction as you write.
- 105. 105 A/B Test Metadata A/B test your page titles and meta descriptions by creating different buckets of pages, making changes, and reviewing their CTR performance. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 106. 106 Analysis: Compare your CTR AWR publishes CTR stats by vertical https://advancedwebranking.com/ctrstu dy TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 107. 107 Hypothesis: Identify Specifically Where You Underperform Develop your hypotheses based keywords that underperform based on the expected CTR. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 108. 108 Use Wordnet to Scale Keyword Variant Discovery https://wordnet.princeton.edu/ TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 109. 109 Automate Inclusion of Emerging Keywords from GSC in Rankings Monitor your queries on a page-level week over week to identify new emerging keyword opportunities and automatically add them to your rank tracking. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 111. 111 Review Competitors’ Usage of Entities When Google is processing content, they extract and score entities. Compare your page’s entity salience and ordering against your competitors to identify what you need to feature. Do the same as you do your keyword research. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 112. 112112 Use Entities for Intelligent Internal Link Building You can use the same data on your own site to determine how to automate internal link building. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 117. 117 Uncomfortable with APIs? If APIs sound daunting to you, here’s a Knime Analytics workflow that will make it easier for you to pull data from an API and format it into a table. https://www.knime.com/blog/a-restful- way-to-find-and-retrieve-data TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 119. 119 Natural Language Generation is the Next Big Thing I suspect that in the near future, a lot of this will be available to automate. There are already solutions that are more than just sophisticated content spinners. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 121. 121 Wrapping Up Bringing it Home! TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 122. 122 How to do effective Technical Content Optimization A. Determine Search Engine Expectations B. Optimize your Content C. Test All the Things D. Win the SERPs TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 125. 125 This is Our CEO. (And, I’m #ZORASDAD) TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 126. 126 At iPullRank, we’re incorporating Natural Language Processing into our workflows to better understand the expectations of Google. TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION
- 127. 127 Thank You | Q&A Mike King Managing Director Twitter: @iPullRank Email: [email protected] TECHNICALCONTENTOPTIMIZATION