Most SEOs understand that entities existm but really do not differentiate between Entities and words. Words are simply labels for those entities. Knowing this is key to understanding SEO and indeed Internet Marketing in the modern world.
Freebase was a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members. It was an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual, user-submitted wiki contributions.[3][2] Freebase aimed to create a global resource that allowed people (and machines) to access common information more effectively. It was developed by the American software company Metaweb and run publicly beginning in March 2007. Metaweb was acquired by Google in a private sale announced on 16 July 2010.[4] Google's Knowledge Graph is powered in part by Freebase.[5]
This knowledge graph soon became the beating heart of search engines. The connections between entities have meant th
How can we approach using Entities to make your SEO better?
Well – it always helps if start by using something that Googlish…
Google reads content, page by page, noticing entity by entity, then uses that to augment its entity within it Knowledge Graph.
Google Call this their “Natural Language AI” (previously NLP API) but it compresses content into Machine readable nuggets and the also have another one for Pictures and another for spoken word.
Schema helps Google to associate the correct concept to the correct record in ots knowledge graph.
But you HAVE to reflect reality in your schema…
The word "Paris" is much more than just a word.
It is an entity... a thing that you understand.
Those little words affect User intent... I got engaged IN the Paris Hilton... not TO the Paris Hilton!
Modern search retrieval is based on neural Networks connecting entities…
A neural network is a method in artificial intelligence that teaches computers to process data in a way that is inspired by the human brain. It is a type of machine learning process, called deep learning, that uses interconnected nodes or neurons in a layered structure that resembles the human brain. It creates an adaptive system that computers use to learn from their mistakes and improve continuously. Thus, artificial neural networks attempt to solve complicated problems, like summarizing documents or recognizing faces, with greater accuracy. (AWS)
Entities are connected to each other – and make interesting stories when used together.
Now you know why entities are important, lets look at putting them into practice. Take your business, maybe it sells hiking boots. To cover the entities meaningfully, you need to understand the entity clusters.
Imagine that you arrived on a new planet, with a new species and an entirely new way of communicating. Let’s say they talk in Gestures… (Like the French?)… Nasa has spent ages thinking about this problem. Wikipedia dedicates a large article to it. A large part of the logic is to use mathematical ideas to communicate. In other words, Entities scale much better. Let’s put this another way… we can all agree that translation programs are pretty decent now, right? Certainly much better than 10 years ago. So if you write an article with all the right “words” to rank in (say) English, what happens when the article is translated into 100 other languages? But, if you write an article containing all the important ENTITIES in the right order to rank in English, then when that article is translated into 100 languages, you still have a solid SEO foundation.
Finding the entities that work for your niche a =re universal. Use tools such as inlinks to collect and visualize these. Treat google as an nalien.
Think of your website like a spider's web. Every time you write meaningfully about an entity that’s related to your main topic, your web grows. If you make your web of connections so big, eventually the flies will have no other place to go apart from your web, making you a very happy spider.
Look at the cost saving of being knowledge leader when it comes to marketing in your verticle/.
Google uses entities everywhere
They are the beating heart and they are connected
They use Neural Networking to do this
Aligning your brand’s content around entities related to your business values = a big financial win.