Entity salience is beginning to come to the forefront of website architecture. Search engine giants like Google have started using a salience score to analyze and prioritize search results. To understand how entity salience can help your website perform better in the result rankings and improve search engine optimization, you first have to learn what an entity is and how salience applies to it.
Understanding natural language processing
Google and other sites use natural language processing to determine the overall meaning of text content on a webpage. This function is carried out by an artificial intelligence program to identify what a real human would find important in a block of text. You can improve content management by focusing on entity salience, though it is important to note that entity salience is not the same thing as SEO keywords.
Entities
An entity is usually a specific word in a text that references a noun. For example, a person, a business, a product, and even a number may be recognized as entities within a body of text. A natural language processing AI can identify entities even when they are not specifically named, like when a named person is mentioned again in nominal form. The identification of these entities is the first step toward building a salience score.
Salience
When referred to an entity, salience means exactly what its Merriam-Webster definition is: being especially noticeable or conspicuous. In text, entities that are salient are those words that the AI detects as being important or prominent to a real person. This does not necessarily mean that someone who reads a website’s content will pick up on all those words. The AI simply uses its estimation of salient entities to create a score of readability and SEO popularity.
The salience score
Several factors contribute to how these entities are identified through natural language processing. From a single block of text, an entity may be chosen because of its location in the text, its grammar, if it is linked to sections of the sentence, and how much it stands out. Again, names, nouns, and pronouns all get bonus points in the process. The distinction between entities and keywords is incredibly important to content writers, as a writer can work to incorporate an entity and keyword closely together so that they both rank higher together.
Calculating your salience score
Since salience scores are not yet fully popularized and it is not clear how much they may improve website SEO, finding a website to calculate your score can be difficult. Lexalytics and the Google Natural Language API Demo are both options where you can type in text and see how it ranks. By experimenting with different types of texts, you can discover what entities get identified the most and how to write content around salience and SEO.
Learn more about salience scores for your website
There is still a lot that needs to be explored with entity salience. To learn more about how your business can benefit the most from these scores and how to incorporate them into your everyday content, contact us for information and guidance.
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