Links and supplemental content

Many webmasters overlook the importance of linking as a topic signal.

Several well-known Google search patents and early research papersdescribe analyzing a page's links as a way to determine topic relevancy. These include both internal links to your own pages and external links to other sites, often with relevant anchor text.

Google's own Quality Rater Guidelines cites the value external references to other sites. It also describes a page's supplemental content, which can includes internal links to other sections of your site, as a valuable resource.

If you need an example of how relevant linking can help your SEO, The New York Times famously saw success, and an increase in traffic, when it started linking out to other sites from its topic pages.

Although this guide discusses on-page topic optimization, topical external links with relevant anchor text can greatly influence how search engines determine what a page is about. These external signals often carry more weight than on-page cues, but it almost always works best when on-page and off-page signals are in alignment.

Position, frequency, and distance

How a page is organized can greatly influence how concepts relate to each other.

Once search engines find your keywords on a page, they need to determine which ones are most important, and which ones actually have the strongest relationships to one another.

Three primary techniques for communicating this include:

• Position: Keywords placed in important areas like titles, headlines, and higher up in the main body text may carry the most weight.
• Frequency: Using techniques like TF-IDF, search engines determine important phrases by calculating how often they appear in a document compared to a normal distribution.
• Distance: Words and phrases that relate to each other are often found close together, or grouped by HTML elements. This means leveraging semantic distance to place related concepts close to one another using paragraphs, lists, and content sectioning.

A great way to organize your on-page content is to employ your primary and secondary related keywords in support of your focus keyword. Each primary related phrase becomes its own subsection, with the secondary related phrases supporting the primary, as illustrated here.

As an example, the primary keyword phrase of this page is 'On-page Topic Targeting'. Supporting topics include: keywords and relationships, on-page optimization, links, entities, and keyword tools. Each related phrase supports the primary topic, and each becomes its own subsection.