What Website Ontologies Mean for Your Small Business
What is an Ontology?
In information retrieval, an ontology is a structure to organize entities. This organization shows the relationship among different entities (subjects) on your website. It’s like organizing your closet. Shoes here. Shirts here. Trousers here.
Search engines must retrieve information to answer queries—questions people ask on the web. When your website is organized, search engines find it easy to locate information and use it to answer a query.
The organization is important because it helps web search engines like Google readily understand the nature of your business. When everything on your website is a jumble, search engines need to work harder to understand your business. This is important because if you want material on your website to show up in search results, search engines need to understand.
The ontology of your website starts with your business entity—your business. Then the relationship between your business, your products, your services, your blog posts, are categorized as they link together.
Organize Your Web Closet
Ontologies simplify complexities. You know that closet in the back hall where there’s a jumble of mixed objects. You know something’s in there but not where. Without ontologies, your website looks like Fibber McGee’s closet to search engines.
The first step to organize your website is to consider the organization. How do people who arrive at your website know where to go to find the information they need? Spending time thinking about how to organize the pages on your site and drawing a plan, will accomplish two things:
You will have a clear understanding of how the organization works for your business.
Implementing your organization will help search engines and site visitors understand how the pages on your site are connected to your business. And, for site visitors, how your pages connect with them.
The more pages you have on your website, the more you need an organization structure to display the relationships among the pages and to your business.
Once you have an understanding of how you want to organize your website, then you can take steps to implement your organization structure—the ontology.
Action Steps to Create An Ontology for Your Website
You can help your website gain visibility to search engines by thinking organizationally. Each step is a decision about how you present concepts and details so they can be discovered.
Group Content So It Makes Sense For Your Business
Create a group of pages for each major aspect of your website. Put all the videos together. Group your product lists in one section. Categorize your articles.
For instance, if you are an oral surgeon who also shares with medical peers, group pages and articles for clients in one section, and pages and articles for medical peers in another. Make it clear what goes where. Remember you are organizing complexity. Don’t make site visitors or search engines have to scroll through trying to find the right information for their question.
Map Your Subjects
Know what you need in each category. Then map each group to the right place on your website. If you are a real estate professional map out where each of your subjects appears: house prices, case studies, protection from natural disaster, home inspection, home insurance, tips on saving money, pitfalls, best home choices for a budget.
Mapping subjects will help you discover needs you may need to fill in for subjects you haven’t addressed… yet.
Use Keywords
Although semantic search does not rely on keywords, you can use them as sign posts in your content. Use them naturally along with their synonyms and related phrases and variations. These semantic relationships help search engines extract information from your web page.
Link to Resources
Linking to trusted resources outside your own web site verifies your authority. Make sure your resources are trustworthy (respected journals, educational sites, industry leaders) and provide high-quality information.
Because links to outside sources group relevant, high-quality data, you increase the value of your page as a resource.
Use Alt text and Descriptions
Detailed Alt text for images helps search engines understand the image. More importantly, Alt text helps search engines understand how the image relates to the other topics (entities) on the page.
When you link to outside sources, make sure the content around the link anchor words describes how the outside resource adds value.
Make sure your Alt text and descriptions reflect the ontology you want to create for your website.
Arrange Website Navigation
Now that you understand where each page and each article or video fits into the organization of your website, create a navigation menu for the website. Keep the menu simple so it reflects the ontologies you want to create for your website.
The navigation menu is a guide, not an index. You don’t need every page on your website in the menu. Use internal links on menu pages to lead site visitors toward other relevant pages.
Content Creation Ontology
As you create new content for your web site, think of how the content fits in the ontology.
David Amerland, in his book SEO Help: 20 Practical Steps suggests:
Concept>Attributes>Value
Thinking this way about your content creates a specifically identifiable value in how search engines will index the content. And, then, search engines know how to serve that content in search.
For this article Content = Web Presence, Attribute = Website Structure, Value = Ontologies.
Starting this way for each piece of content will help you know how it fits in the website organization.
Ontologies Clarify Your Intent
Ontologies make clear what your website is about. Search engines easily find what you have and they find the right source of information to deliver to people searching on the web.
By taking the time to organize your website pages according to how they fit into the overall concept of your business, you identify where everything belongs in your website closet.
In the process of constructing ontologies, you also make it easier for anyone who comes to your site, whether as the result of a search query or any other way, to follow your logical organization to explore other pages on your site.
In the SEO world conversations about ontologies can be convoluted, but applying ontologies to your website is basically taking the time to think logically, organize material into categories, and make sense of all the material on your website.
Thinking about website organization is one of my first priorities when creating content for clients. If you are looking for content that reflects your business for search engines and customers, fill out the contact information and we’ll start a conversation.
Photo by jaikishan patel on Unsplash
