Reminder on natural referencing

As we have written many times, natural referencing is based on 2 criteria: content and links.

Optimizing a site consists in creating rich and relevant content based on keywords (or queries) related to the positioning, the activity, the sector in which one seeks to be present.

The links are of 2 types: external (or backlinks), which come from external sites, and which are a confirmation of the notoriety of the site within the internet community (a sign of recognition of your competence in the matter in some way). sort) and internal which are the links between the pages of the same site, all of these links constituting what is called the mesh of the site.

SEO and semantics

The Google engine is constantly improving and the knowledge base (called Knowledge graph) that it has incorporated since 2012 in its algorithm allows it to give a lot of “weight” to words. He tries to understand the meaning of the words, the meaning of the requests formulated by the Net surfers to finally offer them the best answer. The consequence is that we no longer reason on keywords but in terms of thematic and semantics.

Concretely, this implies that it is necessary to analyze the entire semantic universe and the lexical field, in order to identify the target that we want to reach (“how Internet users will try to find their answers”), to understand what we want to highlight, and to relate these expectations to the content and keywords of the site that meets them.

Depending on these expectations and the pages that we want to “grow” in the results of the engine, we will write main pages focused on these themes but also additional pages, with related or additional content in terms of information. but semantically close to the main “mother” page. Then, we will link these pages with the links, this is called the internal mesh.

It is this relationship between the pages of a site that is very important as well as the roles of each to help the engine to understand what we are talking about, and to circulate the “juice” as well as possible. , the level of credibility of the content.

The distribution is then:

  • “Mother” or main page, which “sucks” the “daughter” and “sisters” pages
  • “Sister” or complementary page which “pushes” the “mother” page and links sister pages at the same level
  • “Daughter” page, which pushes the “mother” page, sucks up other “daughter” pages and links the “sister” pages

Silo and semantic cocoon

Without going into detail, these 2 concepts are quite close and complimentary but different in that the concept of the silo is based on keywords (the keywords are segmented into themes to decide which keyword will be the main keyword of the target page or “mother” and what will be the keywords of the long tail therefore intermediate) while in the semantic cocoon, the mesh is semantically contextualized by giving meaning to the links and grouping the pages together in a common semantic universe.

The semantic cocoon is a logic of architecture, of internal mesh of the pages of the site which will seek to give importance to the links between the pages and therefore of the “juice” in order to bring out certain strategic pages.

In summary,
– silos group together close pages in the same place
– pages push towards each other
– links are like rubber bands that attract linked pages