Speaking about search engines, experts very often refer to the term “relevance”. At the level of intuition, its meaning is clear to everyone.
At its core, relevance is how much a particular document or text matches a user's request. Roughly speaking, the more accurately the content answers the user's question, the higher the level of its relevance to this request.
How it works?
What is the difference between a relevant and an irrelevant result? This is easiest to understand by looking at a simple life example.
So, you are a schoolboy or student who was asked to write an essay on a specific topic. Few people today spend hours in the library searching and analyzing all the information. After all, it’s much easier to find the right job on the network, perhaps a little change it and pass off as the result of your work. We leave moral issues aside and look at it from a different perspective.
What do you need to find first? Absolutely true: the site on which the finished essays are published. You open the search engine page (be it Google, Yandex or any other) and enter the word "abstracts" in the search bar. The search engine instantly scans the indexed pages database and finds in it links to about 8 million different pages on which the word we need occurs 30 million times in total.
It should be noted that the search engine finds this word both on the page of the "Bank of Abstracts" website and on Twitter of Katya, unknown to us, who "wrote an essay all night and wants to sleep."
This is where the concept of “relevant” is included. This means that the search engine determines which link is more likely to interest the user. That is why the link to the “Bank of abstracts” we see already on the first page (it better matches the request), and the lonely post on Twitter devoted to Katy’s life upheavals remains somewhere on the ... thirties, although the word “abstract” is also present in it .
Now that you’ve got a general idea of what relevance and relevant search are, you can move on to more interesting points.
Why does your site need relevant material?
Of course, modern search engines are imperfect and, resorting to certain tricks, you can promote even irrelevant pages for a specific request. In practice, you most likely have come across this more than once: for example, you searched for results for “buy a washing machine”, and the search engine directed you to a page where the history of this unit was painted.
What are you doing in this situation? Close the site and continue to search further.
If your articles are irrelevant with respect to certain key requests, visitors to your resource will also not linger on it.
In addition to this, the presence of relevant content on the page significantly accelerates its promotion and helps to increase positions in the overall ranking.
In fact, thanks to it, you increase website traffic, create a positive reputation for your resource and, as a result, increase your income.
The most effective tips for creating relevant pages for your site!
First of all, you need to identify key queries that are suitable for the selected page of the site. The more accurate they are, the better. That is, if we are talking about the page of the online store where you can order a kettle, it is more logical to promote it according to relevant requests. For example: “buy a teapot”, “an online store of dummies”, etc. Of course, you will not lie to your visitors if you use phrases such as “kitchen utensils” or “buy kitchen utensils”. But then, in addition to your potential customers who really want to get a new teapot, people will also go to the site who, to put it mildly, do not need it at all.
So how do you create truly effective, maximally relevant content?
1. Make a competent title . This tag is the name of the page. It should be as bright as possible, original and accurately describe the information presented on the page itself. To do this, the title should contain your main keyword.
Example: if you promote a page for “Indian tea”, then the title may look something like this: “History of Indian tea”, “Buy the most delicious Indian tea at a discount”, etc., depending on the main material.
Remember that it is important to maintain the natural wording and not to chase the exact occurrence of the COP.
2. Prescribe keywords . This is a separate item in the code of the page, indicating how it should be promoted, a sort of “beacon” for search engines. No need to get carried away and write dozens of words, phrases and their combinations: the optimal number of keywords is from 3 to 5.
3. Create a description . Description is a short description of the page that performs 2 functions at once: it promotes more efficient search promotion and shows users what the article says. There are several “golden rules” for writing such descriptions:
- it is desirable that the entire description consist of 2 sentences;
- you can insert a keyword at the beginning of the first sentence, as well as in the middle or end of the second;
- if used in exact form does not work, you can morphologically change them.
The main thing here, as in the entire process of creating relevant content, is naturalness.
4. Headings and subheadings . Do not neglect them. First, a structured article looks much better and easier to read. Secondly, by including in the h1, h2, h3 tags the main and additional relevant phrases, you can make the right accents and improve the position of the page in search engines.
5. Use pictures! Illustrated material is always more relevant. This means that out of two articles that are similar in theme and volume, to one of which thematic images will be attached, the latter has more chances to be in the TOP of the search engine. In order to achieve this, you need to write a description of each image (alt attribute). It is also desirable to use selected key queries in it.
Please note that if there are several images on the page, the alt descriptions should not be the same!
By following all these recommendations, you can create truly relevant content that will be interesting to people and will “please” search bots.
Let's talk about the "filling" of the text
Everything is simple here. The text should correspond to the subject matter of key queries and the page itself. In addition, its informative value matters. After reading it, the visitor should gather some useful information for himself, find answers to his questions. Only in this case can the word “relevant” be applied to the text.
This applies specifically to the “human” face of your material. But there is another side, because our goal is to appeal not only to users, but also to search engines.
The harmonious occurrence of key phrases (both in an exact and inclined way) matters here. For greater weight, it is recommended to enclose them in a tag.
Your article should be neither too short (less than 400 words) nor too long (more than 2000 words). Although the main emphasis should be on informational content. If you managed to cover the whole question in 1,500 characters, you should not “pour water” to bring the volume of the text to the desired size.
How to find out the relevance of a page?
Most domestic SEO-masters use the convenient MegaIndex service. It allows not only to find out the relevance of the page as a percentage, but also to get a lot of additional useful information. For example, with its help you will learn about what negatively affects the level of relevance of a page and what needs to be fixed in order to make it attractive to users and bots.