SEO: Shifting our thinking from Keywords to Entities with Dixon Jones from inLinks.net (episode 051)

by April Buencamino-dy

Dixon’s career as an SEO specialist stretches right back to 1999 when he founded one of the UK’s first SEO agencies (still going strong today). Many in the SEO world know him best as Marketing Director at the awesome SEO tool Majestic… But for the last 12 months his primary focus is on inLinks.net, where he and his team are building a new way to build your marketing presence.

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How Dixon got started in SEO

Dixon used to write and run Murder Mystery Evenings for a living. As the Internet came along, he had his own website and his reason for picking a web hosting company is an amusing one!

Based on the data showing who visited his website, he rebuilt it to sell online versions in forms of 70-page TIF files. He started thinking of ways to get more visible online, and after searching for murder mystery games in Yahoo! and getting a completely unrelated advert for Nike, he knew that SEO was going to be a thing. 

It was then that he started doing it professionally in 1999, learning with his own site and initially, with just one client.

Evolution of Keyword Research

Google has changed its approach from just thinking of web pages to now thinking of concepts to scale information retrieval much better.

Things not strings is the theme now, and the world getting organized based on topics and not web pages suddenly makes you change the way you look at keyword research.

Entities to Target

  1. Look at what your competitor or the market leader has already done. Run an analysis of their content and find out all of the web pages and topics they’ve got. InLinks’ tool analyzes the data and you can use that to get topics so you can talk about the same things as the market leader.
  2. InLinks has built a system that tracks entities, and tracks interests and breaks them down into areas. This can provide you the topics and entities that have caught the zeitgeist of the world, providing you the place to start for your own content writing.

How do we create the content?

It depends on the quality of the writer. Dixon prefers to have a content writer that is charged with writing the knowledge leadership piece around the topic, rather than having someone who just fills in the words or jumbles phrases from different web pages to create content.

The challenge is to choose a page that’s about the topic, write your content, and link the user and the search engine back through to the pure page about the topic. This allows you to build your cornerstone pilar piece on the subject which is important.

About Schema

Let your content be understood with the use of InLinks About Schema tool. It defines your content, and connects it to the knowledge graphs of search engines and links to entities.

You can do it manually, but what About Schema does is run its own as well as Google’s NLP algorithm over the content, extracts entities, and calculates which are the more important ones. 

Remember that Google has to understand your page and your content before it can rank it.

Insider Tips

If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with SEO – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?

Dixon says: do what you’re good at.

For SEO, doing what you know gives you the chance to be the best at something. Don’t go off-tangent; focus on the content around your business model.

Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve SEO performance?

If you know what your phrase is and you’re on the second page of Google, revise your content to get yourself on the first page.

However, to create a little bit of a wave, continue to innovate your product and continue to wow your audience. Talking about new products is the bit that excites, and wowing the people gets you links.

If someone listening wants to learn more about SEO is there one cheap/free resource you’d recommend?

Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in SEO?

Passage indexing is what’s coming, and this makes a whole lot of sense. Cutting a web page into chunks and analyzing chunks of content instead of the whole page, and content that is succinctly worded may be better.

Interview Links

Dixon on Social media:

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