The main objective behind recent changes in Google's search algorithm is to help it deliver the highest quality, most relevant content to the searcher. How is this relevant to your website?
By helping Google, and other search engines, easily decipher and categorise the content of your website, you can significantly boost the site's ranking performance for the keywords that matter.
Google's recent focus on semantic search has given a massive boost to websites which categorise content effectively as it helps to determine the page/topic relevancy. Previously, content categorisation seemed to be exclusive to ecommerce websites. Now, this approach is equally relevant to small business websites selling a small range of products or services.
How can content categorisation boost a website's search engine visibility?
Take the example of a company offering contract cleaning services in Dublin. It's likely the company will be offering a broad range of services, from contract cleaning to carpet cleaning, window cleaning etc.
To extract the most SEO benefit, you ought to create a separate page for each of the services in question and write original, useful & relevant copy specific to that service. By separating the content in this way, you can also write relevant and original meta titles & descriptions for each page/post which the search engines will use to attach further relevancy and authority to the content.
Far too many websites take the “blunderbuss” approach and throw every bit of information about every product or service into one page. The theory here is that the more keywords you can weave into the content, the better it will rank for multiple search terms in Google's results. However, a poorly categorised and organised website will minimise and dilute the keyword performance of your site.
SEO obsessed, rugby-loving Welshman living in Ireland since 2002. Freelance SEO and Wordpress web design consultant based in Killaloe, Co Clare.
Jones, I totally agree with you. Besides titles and descriptions, a HUGE opportunity is still unused and that is “schema” or rich snippet. All major search engines are encouraging site owners and webmasters to implement it. Those site owners who have integrated schema coding in the sites are getting more and more traffic.
One another thing is – people are more interested to click on links that show up with the author’s image (Google profile image). Needless to say the role of social media shares and other backlinks. I am sure more meaning changes are on the way.