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.
A good keyword phrase or entity is one that predicts the presence of other phrases and entities on the page. For example, a page about "The White House" predicts other phrases like "president," "Washington," and "Secret Service." Incorporating these related phrases may help strengthen the topicality of "White House."
2. Position, frequency, and distance
How a page is organized can greatly influence how concepts relate to each other.
Once search engines find your keywords on a page, they need to determine which ones are most important, and which ones actually have the strongest relationships to one another.
Three primary techniques for communicating this include:
- Position: Keywords placed in important areas like titles, headlines, and higher up in the main body text may carry the most weight.
- Frequency: Using techniques like TF-IDF, search engines determine important phrases by calculating how often they appear in a document compared to a normal distribution.
- Distance: Words and phrases that relate to each other are often found close together, or grouped by HTML elements. This means leveraging semantic distance to place related concepts close to one another using paragraphs, lists, and content sectioning.
A great way to organize your on-page content is to employ your primary and secondary related keywords in support of your focus keyword. Each primary related phrase becomes its own subsection, with the secondary related phrases supporting the primary, as illustrated here.
As an example, the primary keyword phrase of this page is 'On-page Topic Targeting'. Supporting topics include: keywords and relationships, on-page optimization, links, entities, and keyword tools. Each related phrase supports the primary topic, and each becomes its own subsection.
3. Links and supplemental content
Many webmasters overlook the importance of linking as a topic signal.
Several well-known Google search patents and early research papers describe analyzing a page's links as a way to determine topic relevancy. These include both internal links to your own pages and external links to other sites, often with relevant anchor text.
Google's own Quality Rater Guidelines cites the value external references to other sites. It also describes a page's supplemental content, which can includes internal links to other sections of your site, as a valuable resource.
If you need an example of how relevant linking can help your SEO, The New York Times famously saw success, and an increase in traffic, when it started linking out to other sites from its topic pages.
Although this guide discusses on-page topic optimization, topical external links with relevant anchor text can greatly influence how search engines determine what a page is about. These external signals often carry more weight than on-page cues, but it almost always works best when on-page and off-page signals are in alignment.
4. Entities and semantic markup
Google extracts entities from your webpage automatically, without any effort on your part. These are people, places and things that have distinct properties and relationships with each other.
• Christopher Nolan (entity, person) stands 5'4" (property, height) and directed Interstellar (entity, movie)
Even though entity extraction happens automatically, it's often essential to mark up your content with Schema for specific supported entities such as business information, reviews, and products. While the ranking benefit of adding Schema isn't 100% clear, structured data has the advantage of enhanced search results.
For a solid guide in implementing schema.org markup, see Builtvisible's excellent guide to rich snippets.
5. Crafting the on-page framework
You don't need to be a search genius or spend hours on complex research to produce high quality, topic optimized content. The beauty of this framework is that it can be used by anyone, from librarians to hobby bloggers to small business owners; even when they aren't search engine experts.
A good webpage has much in common with a high quality university paper. This includes:
- A strong title that communicates the topic
- Introductory opening that lays out what the page is about
- Content organized into thematic subsections
- Exploration of multiple aspects of the topic and answers related questions
- Provision of additional resources and external citations
Your webpage doesn't need to be academic, stuffy, or boring. Some of the most interesting pages on the Internet employ these same techniques while remaining dynamic and entertaining.
Keep in mind that 'best practices' don’t apply to every situation, and as Rand Fishkin says "There's no such thing as 'perfectly optimized' or 'perfect on-page SEO.'" Pulling everything together looks something like this:
Download High Resolution Image
This graphic is highly inspired by Rand Fishkin's great Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO. This guide doesn't replace that canonical resource. Instead, it should be considered a supplement to it.
5 alternative tools for related keyword and entity research
For the search professional, there are dozens of tools available for thematic keyword and entity research. This list is not exhaustive by any means, but contains many useful favorites.
1. Alchemy API
One of the few tools on the market that delivers entity extraction, concept targeting and linked data analysis. This is a great platform for understanding how a modern search engine views your webpage.
2. SEO Review Tools
The SEO Keyword Suggestion Tools was actually designed to return both primary and secondary related keywords, as well as options for synonyms and country targeting.
3. LSIKeywords.com
The LSIKeyword tool performs Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) on the top pages returned by Google for any given keyword phrase. The tool can go down from time to time, but it's a great one to bookmark.
4. Social Mention
Quick and easy, enter any keyword phrase and then check "Top Keywords" to see what words appear most with your primary phrase across the of the platforms that Social Mention monitors.
5. Google Trends
Google trends is a powerful related research tool, if you know how to use it. The secret is downloading your results to a CSV (under settings) to get a list up to 50 related keywords per search term.
The above tools are free or have a free element. A small number of reputable companies also offer robust paid solutions worth checking out, including MarketMuse, Searchmetrics and Brightedge.
For those wanting to explore more keyword and topic modeling tools, here are a few of the more popular and useful.
Keyword Research:
Topic Modeling (advanced):
Thanks for sharing these Cyrus, these topic modeling tools are new for me.. will explore them now.
Add these tools and you have a really nice suite of keyword research tools...
- Keywordsnatcher https://keywordsnatcher.com/ (paid)
- Keywordshitter!! https://keywordshitter.com/ (free)
- Termexplorer https://termexplorer.com/ (paid)
I just tried that second tool and I was amazed at the quantity of good results I got. (I just have to make sure no one walks up behind me while I am on that page. "No, it's an SEO tool! Really...")
Keyword$#!tter: Says what it does, does what it says
Another tool to consider: sonar.bottlenose.com displays topics and their relation to one another (in real-time) based on how people are talking about them on twitter.
Thanks for another advanced on-page SEO article, Cyrus. It's becoming crucial that we all understand these concepts more each day.
This is awesome!
You brought up a concept I frequently use with clients: "A good webpage has much in common with a high quality university paper." While you put it a little more eloquently, I often have clients/copywriters think of Google as a college professor that will be grading (ranking) your term paper on a curve. Research, analysis, brainstorming, nailing down a thesis (topic), creating an outline (or content wireframe/structure), determining titles/subtitles (H1/2/3), then writing intro/body/concluding paragraphs, using proper grammar, citing your sources, providing helpful/relevant visuals... To me, the preparation & process of creating a quality term paper is the same as creating a user- and search-friendly, well optimized page.
Happy to see I'm not the only one thinking about/simplifying on-page SEO in this way! :)
Thanks Cyrus! Great post and of course the tools, because there is some I didn't know. The list of tools of the post is ordered by importance? Thanks again.
The lists includes new and often overlooked tools. Each has it's own advantages and use cases, so they are not listed in order.
Hi:
Great post and great inphographic, what tool it is the best for keyword research?
Hi Sir,
I am doing seo of my office website. I use rel canonical for http to https redirection. It has some issue after this. My https://www.akclinics.com don't get ranked on serp. After doing a lots of good work. What is the main reason behind this. Kindly help me out.I am in big pressure by boss.
This would make a great question for the Moz Q&A!
Cyrus,
Excellent overview and visuals of article layout. Definitely bookmarked! I'll be back soon to go through the resources!
Can you add to the list Tejji Keyword Tool which is an upgrade to Ubersuggest. This tool get lot more suggest keywords than any other tool with by using features provided on the tool
Thanks for the blog!
Indeed a very useful post/visual guide Cyrus.
I am especially very happy to see you are suggesting Google Trends, because is a much less used "suggestion" tool, as people usually refer to Google Suggest and Google Related Searches.
About Google Related Searches, one thing that everybody can do is to
This very simple research helps understanding how Google links one search topic to another, and it can help us understanding the topical landscape related to our first search.
Another nice thing to do is - if our query returned a classic Knowledge Graph box on the rights side of the SERPs - looking at what other "Entities" people searched apart the one shown in the present KG Box. Those could be defined as "Related Entities", which not necessarily are directly connected to the one presented, but usually lie in a sort of six degrees of separation from it.
That analysis helps us understanding how people relates Entities (people, brands, things...) between them.
Finally, cough cough, I too talked about Topic Modelling in my WBF few weeks ago :-)
One slightly easier way of scraping Google suggestions is Ubersuggest.
No doubt that this is a great method to get as many related entities as possible.
Quite often it'll uncover things I never would have thought about!
keywordtool.io is an upgrade on Ubersuggest, IMO. Scrapes Google, Bing, and YouTube, and even App Store suggestions. Kind of Ubersuggest 2.0. I'd encourage you to check it out!
When I started reading this article about topic modeling, the first thing I thought of was Gianluca Fiorelli's recent WBF on the same subject. Topic modeling is definitely a hot topic right now! :-)
It was truly a great Whiteboard Friday. Here's the link again: https://moz.com/blog/topical-hubs-whiteboard-friday
Thanks for this information. The Google Trends is a tool that uses more every day to see what words best wish to use in the title.
I really thing using anything Google is essential for ranking on Google, but I always walk away with two opposing thoughts:
Thanks Cyrus for once again a great post. And thanks Gianluca for the Google Trends and Knowledge Graph tips!
In an attempt to answer your question "What are your best tips for creating semantically rich, topic focused content?", I'd say I do the low cost version of your detailed guide...
1. I search for all terms related to my main keyword/focus. For this I use keywordtool.io, ubbersuggest and planner for example.
2. Then I gather everything in one Excel sheet.
3. Dedupe!
4. Important step, I try to associate a search intent behind each term (those can be: informational, commercial, branded for instance)
5. From a pivot table, I create a graph highlighting all search intents according to their volume in my list.
This will then give me a quick overview of relations and interests from searchers.
For example, from a list of 1000 terms, 20% can have an informational intent, 35% a commercial intent, etc...
This will then guide how the content can be developped.
Thanks Anthony, intent is a really smart way to approach this. Reminds me of a great deck our friend Mike King put together on persona-driven keyword research, that uses a similar process.
Indeed I remember that deck. Slide 51 is very true. Although some great tools are starting to incorporate that process (like LinkResearchTools for instance), identifying the intent behind keywords is something that still have to (and should) be done manually in my opinion.
After all, we are humans trying to serve other humans needs.
If you've got old Google analytics data (from before they started "not provided"), it's worth importing the search terms into a spreadsheet and performing analysis. It's surprising the related keywords people used to find you, and with a few tweaks, you can optimise your page for better visibility for those terms.
Obviously this tip only works for those who have old websites and hence have accrued a lot of data in analytics.
This is a great tip Matilda...I've used this a bunch of times in the real world. I find myself optimizing toward what a product can do and use cases for the items vs a item's description. There is a lot more interest in how and why then the what.
Great tip indeed, ended up exporting 175k keywords just on a single blog. Now it's time to filter and analyse. Thank you Matilda.
Thanks Cyrus for informative guide! Most of points you have mentioned in this post I have checked out before. However, I am not sure that it's enough to get ranking with search engine. However, your guide is really informative and helpful! thanks again!
Good explination on the 'Links and supplemental content' section. Thanks
Just gotta say, love your Moz avatar Dean!
Can I add keyword cloud at the bottom of every page of website or should i put it on home page and like every keyword with rest of the pages??
I would resist using keyword clouds at the bottom of every page. Sometimes these can work to a limited degree if you use them for contextual linking, but it can come off as spammy, lead to keyword stuffing actions and could hurt your rankings.
Nice post. Appreciate the illustrations.
You didn't choose Christopher Nolan, Interstellar for an SEO post because it was trending, did you?
I purchased tickets to the movie 2 days before writing the post, so it was very much on my mind!
well written and full of details as always .. thanks :)
Thanks Cyrus!
Nobody use sistrix?
I think that sistrix and semrush are the best for SEO.
Big fan of SEMrush, though I have to admit I've never used Sistrix for any type of topic targeting/keyword research.
Hi Cyrus Great Info on on page and keyword suggestions, This is going to be the future and is the next level game for modern SEO, Also the on page SEO is now not only confined to Title, Description and Keyword density but Google is now also seeing second level symmetrical terms which can raise direct signals to search engine.Thanks
As usual Cyrus, great post. I have shared with those in my company that are responsible for creating content. They always enjoy what Moz has to say and learn so much from it.
Thank you!
Cheers, thank you Shawn!
Solid post here Cyrus....and I like that you color highlighted the various keywords for all to note....well done lad!
It's really difficult to convey these concepts graphically, so I'm glad you noticed the deliberate attempt to group those things together. Thanks Jim.
Great article Cyrus. I'm especially intrigued by the linking section. Had this same question about whether it is OK to constantly link out to other relevant pages on the web. I know it is dramatically going to improve user experience, but so far I feared that on the flipside I'm going to lose rankings by continually doing this strategy. Wanted to create some interesting mash-up articles but this dilemma has always held me back.
The Whiteboard Friday video from five years ago really convinced me otherwise. So thanks for including that in your article.
Just a question- would it be better to try and create more relevant pages within my own site (although being time consuming) and link to them, instead of simply pointing the link to other relevant and quality resources on the web?
Thanks
Great, great question.
There seems to be value in linking to both external and internal resources, and on balance I believe you should try to do both.
There is the issue of keyword cannibalization, so I try to watch my anchor text when linking to external sources (and not use the exact match of the page I'm trying to rank). Google is getting better at analyzing anchor text signals but it's still such a strong indicator of relevancy/importance that you want to handle it with care.
YES! Finally, I was waiting a long time for this article, loved your first article, but this is a wonderful extra.
Honestly, I didn't understand much of Rand's post of " A Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO" this was more specific and easier to digest.
Extremely grateful, was searching the web many many times to find an article like this!
Thanks!
Rand's post provides a much broader view of on-page SEO and incorporates many other ranking and usability factors that improve a page's overall chance of succeeding. Hopefully both are valuable in their own way.
Couldn't believe it, apparently I only have seen the image of Rand's post, I never read the whole thing.
Why don't you merge this article with your article you wrote earlier? There was a lot of valuable information in this article, which is a great extension on your previous "More than Keywords: 7 Concepts of Advanced On-Page SEO".
Thanks again, was waiting for this article for a long time. 'Blogpost of the month' - worthy.
Excellent post, Cyrus! Improving topical authority and semantic relevance within a website can be achieved by a comprehensive analysis of the existing posts and then finding opportunities where they can be linked to each other based on topical relevance. Fore example, if I have a 5-year old blog having over 2000 posts, I can analyse the old posts and see if there are any opportunities for me to link to other posts. This can be a time consuming process but this can definitely improve the topical authority within a website.
PS: Please, fix the Title of the Post. It says, "Target Targeting".
D'oh! Fixed. Thanks, Susanta!
That's what I get for testing titles at 1 in the morning.
I LOVE me some SEO Review Tools & Google Trends!!! But these others look awesome as well. [Me diving in]
Good Stuff Cyrus!! Cheers!
Exceptional article. Just look at the infographic anyone can identify clearly how to establish proper extrategia keywords. Definitely one of the best informational resources I've found. Thank you very much for the input.
The best on page SEO guide for me. I have read many, but, here, I have learnt the actual importance of keywords and other, on page factors.
Thanks Cyrus!
I've been enjoying Alchemy recently. It's pretty useful!
Thanks for the detailed post Cyrus. It's hard to explain these things but you made it extremely easy. I'm in the process of training new team members and this will come in REALL handy.
Great infographic information. Very clear. I'm going to print it and put it on the wall. Now, i will see this intormation while i make seo actions. Thanks!
Who said infographics were dead? :) Thanks!
Hello Cyrus..!! Again it's a tremendous post, visual guide and tools make this post great for all. I'wd love always such grateful post.
Great post, just the right balance of science and sensibleness for me!
Hi Cyrus,
Question on #4 LINKS - Should we "nofollow" these out bound links? I have heard recently from seo folks that we should. What do you suggest?
Thanks!
VERY important and relevant info for on-page SEO - thanks Cyrus! - this is a great article :-)
This summation - (pulled from the article) is soooo important.
---> A strong title that communicates the topic
---> Introductory opening that lays out what the page is about
---> Content organized into thematic subsections
---> Exploration of multiple aspects of the topic and answers related questions
---> Provision of additional resources and external citations
Great one Cyrus, you always seem to do a great job at making me feel stupid. :) Thanks for the breakdown on entity and schema relationship. That's actually super helpful for me on a process we've been testing.
l hope the future of writing quality is not ruined by keywords. Goodbye being concise.
Thanks for the illustration! Too many SEOs still don't get that it's not about single keywords and 'keyword density' anymore.
Really helpful post! One question though: in naming variations and related keyword, if one of the related keywords is actually a focus keyword on another page, is it a problem? Thanks for your help!
The illustrations help with the visualizations of how to do the correct type of on page targeting. Thanks.
Hey
This is very helpful and great blog for every seo executive person and I would say thanks for sharing this blog. I want more blogs relative seo.
"The truth is, you can create optimized pages that rank well without understanding complex algorithms." If it works well is that it's mostly a fluke. Better also tame the theory.
In your opinion how important is SEO on page versus external?
Thanks for the article. I'm really liking this more 'relational' approach.
Using this method, what would your approach be for a company that deals in two major market sectors instead of one. Often (like in this article) SEO examples focus on a well-defined topic (like "White House" or "used cars"). But what about a case in which, for example, the company is involved in both pest control and odor removal. For the home page, would you try to still focus on a single keyword phrase (and close variants and synonyms) that would be general enough to encompass both? Or in this case would it work to apply this method to two main keywords on a single page? Although this article (and others) would suggest the first, it often feels that in cases like this where there are two or more topics that are not closely related it's hard to find a single keyword phrase that would generate traffic with the right intent. Would you still try to focus on a single keyword phrase for the homepage that encompasses both topics (like 'environment restoration') vs two phrases (for example 'pest control' and 'odor removal') knowing that it will probably not rank height against competitors, and focus on the single keywords 'pest control' and 'odor removal' on the secondary pages?
My personal favorite is Google Trends, you can find the trends perfectly tailored to location and interest.
I'm late in saying this, but thank you for sharing this fantastic post Cyrus! The graphics take very complex topics and distill them into their easily-grasped essence.
This was incredibly helpful, thank you!! Have already implemented many of these suggestions on my site (www.TimeSheetify.com) and seen improvements.
Thanks again!
John
This is a great article it just gave me tons of ideas to implement into my web developments. Thank you for sharing.
Another brilliant post once again, Cyrus. Do you or does anyone else know if there's an API version of a keyword suggestion generator? SEO Review Tools' Keyword Suggestion Tool is really useful, but I have to enter everything in manually. It would be good if I could query something to automate the process for me and spit out a list in an easy to manipulate format. Naturally a free tool would be preferable. :-) It's a long shot, but if anyone knows anything, please let me know. Thanks, Paul
Fantasic layout of proper on-page content and copywriting. +1 Great article
For most people, I think this really simplifies the process and on-page breakdown of how to do it correctly.
Thanks for the post Cyrus - I would say most of what you have posted makes sense. Any advice on what to do when you are working with a client that doesn't provide the most optimize content? I'm specifically thinking of e-commerce website where there seems to be less words and more images. I understand you can optimize the images and all that but I have found it to be a difficult balance.
Thoughts?
- Brooks
Good article Cyrus. A quick question: when linking, does it make a difference if the links are followed or no-followed? As for creating authority on page, does it matter?
Hard to say. It's usually safe to assume that followed links carry more contextual signals than nofollowed, but there is evidence that nofollowed links carry value too.
On your webpages, I suggest to make Dofollow for internal linking. On the other hand for backlinking from outside, try to use nofollow links.
Awesome post Cyrus, After a long time I have a new topic on onpage. Cyrus, I have a quick question
That secondary related and entity relationships is always applicable? Because sometimes I found low search volume to choose these secondary related and entity.
Anyways a big thanks for nicely explained.
Great question!
Keep in mind the goal of the secondary related keywords is not search volumne (although it certain helps to capture long-tail traffic, sometimes amazingly so!) - but the primary purpose is to provide contextual relevance to your principal keyword phrase. You're basically telling the search engine "look, here's my primary topic and all this other context supports it, so you can be sure my primary topic is what I say it is"
Hope that makes sense.
I thing the whole idea is based on relevant keywords, which is related to the master categories to sub categories. its called symentic key-phrase.
Déjà vu. Didn't you post this a couple weeks ago? Why is the time-date stamp on everything from yesterday & today? Did you add something new to the piece?
Different post :)
https://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts
Awesome Post as always :) Finally I am able to find a good latest post on on page seo. The good thing is that on page is still about keywords and relevant phrases. Also the tools you mentioned at the end of the post looks awesome. It time to play with these tools. :)
Thanks for sharing this wonderful information, its very useful for me to pick up right keyword and write good content apt to that keyword.
Thanks for this post. The information you share is very useful!
It's very important to utilize related keywords. It provides a better user experience and is much more natural. Using the same keyword over and over is obvious and spammy.
Haven't tried alchemy yet, but judging by some of the comments, and of course the fact that you mentioned it in your article, it's something I'm looking forward to trying. Just trying to improve a little bit at a time :) This post was incredibly thorough. I'm equally impressed and grateful you've taken the time to put all this information in such a compact and easy to understand article.
Great post..I've stuck really hard to content theming...but haven't heard of some of the tools you shared. Looking forward to upping my game! Thanks for the insights!
The tools which are given are worth to use. And in On page i would like to give my votes to Keyword and its relationship. You have to give weightage to secondary keywords as well compare to primary keywords. Also the supplemental content should have to be unique and appealing. If everything goes well according to this plan, you will surely get success.
Really great article. We're revamping a lot of our content and this has been very useful. I had a question about the use of heading tags (H1, H2, etc.). Shouldn't they be hierarchical, where the title of your page is an H1 ,which will include your primary keyword, then subsequent headings would move down, so the second heading would be an H2, third an H3... I notice in this article, all the headings, including the title of the article, is an H2. Is there a reason for this and is there a best practice to follow?
Thanks for the post Cyrus, I'm very interested to know more about SEO topics. I've a question for your: How to create business listings without business address?
A beautiful post as usual :)
Great post and best of all - in the right time. We are planning new strategy for our content / articles creation and it might come in handy! Thanks a lot for great overview.
Thanks for sharing such an informative post
This very nice article which is a great in use
thanks a ton, because on-page seo is very much important for new ones.
A clear definition on #seo and the #seo strategies. It is in a trend to share the consequences of the professionals and get rectified with the discussion which is quite appreciative.Especially, it is quite common with the #seo professionals.
jack from bizbilla b2b portal
your article is informative and will eventually help me to attain organic traffic
Thanks for sharing informative post.I really love this content.
thanks for sharing post
Fantastic tips. thanks a lot for such a informative article
Can we use SEO ON-PAGE with cooming soon page? Help me to fix this, please. Thanks for a great SEO topic.
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Hi Cyrus ! That's really helpful for me, but i asked one question that how much i can use keyword density in my content ?
Here is my website Check it out ...
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Hi there! The blog comments aren't really the right spot to ask for help with your websites -- we try to keep them relevant to what the author discussed and valuable for the rest of the readers. Thanks for joining the conversation!
Thanks Cyrus , the points mentioned are really something to heed to. Good quality information and writing.
Thanks for sharing this post...