Entity Based SEO: How To Optimize Your Entity Vocabulary

WordLift analyses your content and detects the words representing the main concepts, facts, persons, and places mentioned in the text. As a content creator or editor, you can identify the entities that better describe the essential meaning of your content between those words. With just one click, those entities will be translated into schema.org markup, and, at the same time, they will be saved into your internal vocabulary.

• What is entity vocabulary?
• The curated vocabulary
• The hidden vocabulary
• The experimental vocabulary
• The alternative vocabulary

What is entity vocabulary?

In WordLift, a vocabulary is a repository of entities. Entities describe the ideas, concepts, places and people you talk about on your website. 

Entities help organize the content that you’re writing. As you annotate an article with an entity, WordLift creates a relationship between the article and entity so that a computer can better understand it.

Every time you annotate an entity, WordLift creates a context card that lets the reader know more about what we are talking about.

For example, as seen in the video below, if I marked the entity Schema.org in my article, WordLift will create a card that the user can click on to read more information about that entity. It is the same for all the entities to which I add the markup. This makes the content more complete and relevant and makes the reader spend more time on the website.

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WordLift, by default, creates new pages in the form of this entity vocabulary. What to do with the new content. We highlight 4 different strategies in this article:

• The Curated Vocabulary. Start adding the most relevant entities to your website, add a description, featured image and make them user friendly. It adds to your workload, but you can link those pages internally and let Google index them.

• The Hidden Vocabulary. Use WordLift to markup each page and article on your site, but don’t link or index the vocabulary. You still benefit from entity-based SEO, but you have less pages and less content to worry about.

• The Experimental Vocabulary. Use a hybrid approach to let your users roam free and access the entities while preventing Google from accessing it. Once you’re ready for prime time, you can easily switch from Experimental to Curated.

• The Alternative Vocabulary. You curate your tags and categories, and we do the rest! You don’t need to spend time building your entity vocabulary because you already invested the time in creating great tags and categories.

Choice 1: The Curated Vocabulary

If you curate the entities in your vocabulary, you can expect some organic traffic to your vocabulary pages. In this case, you have to set the Vocabulary pages as indexed for Google’s crawlers and add a link to those entities from the articles and pages which mention them. 

What does it mean to curate your vocabulary entities?

Creating an entity in your vocabulary is simple and requires just a few essential steps. 

Go to Vocabulary, Add Entity, then add all the information about your entity. 

WordLift automatically suggests which other relevant topics to mark up (they are highlighted) within the text of your content to create links to other entities in your vocabulary.

Complete all the properties of the entity to increase the visibility of your content.

Then Publish, and if you go to the Vocabulary, you can see your entity. 

For example, this is the entity E-commerce SEO created with WordLift where we added Title, Description, sameAS, Excerpt, Entity Type, Image.

In addition, you can use widgets to enrich the page and make the content more attractive. We added like the Faceted Search that you can see below: 

Inserting the Faceted Search widget only takes 3 simple steps, as I show you in the image below: 

Choice 2: The Hidden Vocabulary

On the other hand, you might prefer to focus on your main pages and articles without devoting much time to the entities of your vocabulary. It means that your content will contain the markup, and Google and search engines will continue to understand your website content. Still, the user experience will not be affected by internal links nor Google will index your vocabulary pages. 

To do this, go to your Post, go to WordLift and add a markup to the relevant entities to your content. Then choose which entities you want to not link to and update. 

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You can choose this solution not only if you don’t have time to take care of your vocabulary entities, but also for other reasons: 

• You are using an entity that is the very basis of the topic you are exploring, and you assume your readers already know it enough. 
• It would help if you had to markup semantically your article with many entities, but you are afraid that links could distract your readers.
• You may have an SEO concern about the number of links on your page, and you don’t want to have too many links per article.

You can also globally decide to link or not to link entities in the WordLift Settings.

Go to WordLift settings, go to Link by Default. If you select YES, all entities in your vocabulary that you add with markup to your content will automatically be linked. If you choose NO, you will select which entities to link to and which not to.

Choice 3: The Experimental Vocabulary

In this case, you can start linking your content from your pages without allowing Google to index those pages. Search engine algorithms do not like useless web pages, that is, duplicate pages, off-topic pages, pages with poor content. Using this kind of vocabulary, you avoid showing Google and search engine pages that they might consider irrelevant and penalize your website’s SEO. 

To do this, go to the vocabulary, click the entity, click on Yoast SEO, go to Advanced and change the settings, not allowing search engines to show the page in search results, and update the entity. 

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You can evaluate the results of the content you have chosen to index. Depending on the results you will get, you could decide to start further curating your entities. 

At any time, you can easily switch from Experimental to Curated Vocabulary. 

Choice 4: The Alternative Vocabulary

The fourth option is to augment your website through categories and tags. 

With WordLift 3.32 newly released feature, you don’t need to use the content classification pane of WordLift to add a markup, but you can use a tag or a category directly. It means that all your content with that specific tag is already connected to a tag with smart features, and it’s better recognizable for Google and Bing and other search engines.

In this way, a tag or a category is treated in the same way as an entity recognized in the content classification box. It makes everything easier because if you are already using tags and categories, you don’t need to do anything else that curate them. 

Save the tag with all its properties, and then go to the post. You don’t need to use the Content Classification box but add the tag and update. You can do the same with categories.

Tags and categories are treated in the same way as an entity recognized in the Content Classification box and used to build your Knowledge Graph, making your content intelligent and understandable to search engines. Your website will be automatically optimized for semantic SEO.

Watch the video to learn more👇

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