Material from SEO - Encyclopedia. Relevance of a page to a search query: what it is, how to determine it

Relevance(in SEO) is the correspondence of a website page to an Internet user’s request in a search engine. Simply put, relevance determines the degree to which a user is satisfied with the search results that appear in response to his query.

The site's compliance with the request is calculated by various search engine algorithms. However, the more page content provides the user with the necessary information, the more relevant it is and, accordingly, the higher it ranks in search results.

If a webmaster, having created content for a certain page, ensures a proportional ratio of keywords to the volume of the text itself, then immediately after indexing it can get to the TOP of search engine results. But the content itself may not meet the user's expectations.

For example, you can enter the query: “what is relevance,” and the first place in the search results will be a page that offers services to increase the relevance of a site by a company engaged in SEO website promotion. This is an irrelevant result.

But the search results, for example those located below, will already correspond to the topic you are interested in, that is, answer the query “what is relevance”.

This phenomenon is often observed due to spam pages or doorways - resources that are promoted according to certain requests in order to redirect the visitor to another Internet site that does not meet his request.

Previously, a page that did not meet the request would continue to remain in the TOP, but today modern tools play a big role in ranking websites, including behavioral factors (user behavior on a resource page). Of course, having visited the first (irrelevant) site, you will quickly leave it, and stay longer on subsequent ones, since there is information useful to you there.

Note. Search engines monitor user behavior on pages and, based on this, determine their compliance with queries. If visitors, after following a link, soon leave it, this reduces its relevance and, accordingly, it loses position in search results.

Therefore, today search engines prioritize sites with the most comprehensive, useful and meaningful content that provides comprehensive answers to user questions. It is these resources that make their way to leading positions in search results.

What types of search relevance are there?

Formal. This type of relevance consists of comparing a user request with an indexed page, and it is calculated using a specific formula based on the data collected by the robot. This is the main search engine algorithm.
Content. Determined by specialists called assessors. They analyze the quality of search results based on the relevance of the found page to the query.
Pertinence. Complete user satisfaction with the necessary information. This type of relevance is determined by the behavior of site visitors and their satisfaction with the content of the document. All search engines today strive for such an algorithm.

What factors determine a page's relevance?

Each search engine has its own tools by which it determines the relevance of a resource. However, there are a number of general algorithms that affect the compliance of a web page with user requests.

Text match query

title and description meta tags;
URL pages;
title and subtitles of the text;
direct and diluted occurrences of keywords and phrases in the text;
alt attribute of the img tag (alternative text for the image).

Link Relevance Factors

internal and external linking;
anchors (texts) of links;
authority of referring sites (donors);
link growth rate.

Behavioral factors

number of visitors;
the resources from which they go to the page;
time spent on the site;
number of views;
ease of navigation through sections of the resource to find the information you need;
failure rate;
conversion (number of target actions: registration, purchase, subscription, etc.).

Conclusion

As you can see, the relevance of a site depends on many factors, both external and internal. But if you want your resource to always rank high in search engines, write quality content for people, not for robots. Taking into account modern ranking algorithms, the text component of relevance is one of the main ones for SEO promotion.

Good afternoon, friends! Today is another post about the most important concepts of search engine promotion for bloggers and beginning SEOs. What is site page relevance? is the topic of this article, from which you will learn the definition of relevance, its main components and how it is evaluated by search engines. Let me note that this is a fairly important issue on which the entire process of website ranking is based when preparing documents for search results. Successful SEO promotion of your website in search engines depends on the correct understanding of this term. Therefore, I suggest you take a look at our dictionary and get the necessary information on the central ranking element.

Determining Relevance

What does relevance mean? This is a process in which the similarity of the obtained result with the desired one is checked. This term is used in modern search engines and refers to the correspondence of the information received to the search query specified by the user. According to the definition, when a Yandex or Google visitor types a question, the search engine tries to evaluate various documents from its index and select the most suitable ones for an answer. Thus, the system calculates a measure of correspondence - the degree of match between the document and the search query. Accordingly, if they coincide, then the value of the measure is the largest (maximum), and if not, it is equal to zero.

The effectiveness of any search engine is judged by the degree of relevance of documents in search results. If a user receives an answer to his request that is absolutely inappropriate for him, then there is a high probability that he will no longer use such a resource. Therefore, selecting the most relevant documents for search results is the main task of the search engine. This affects both the popularity of the search engine and its profits.

How relevant a document is on the Internet is determined by a special search algorithm. Yandex has one, Google has another, but the general scheme of its work is the same. Also, other search engines have their own definition of relevance, but it has common roots.

Search algorithm

These are special mathematical expressions and formulas by which search engines select various sites in their search results. Each of these web resources contains one most relevant document, which contains the answer to the user's search query. The principle of operation of the algorithm is very simple: first, all website pages containing the searched query are selected, and then systematic screening occurs - sites without clear information for the user or unauthorized due to the use of prohibited optimization methods (black SEO - cloaking, doorways, etc.) are selected. ). Selected pages are analyzed based on document content and a decision is made on how relevant they are to the search query. And depending on the degree of compliance, each document is assigned its own number in the search results. The smaller it is, the faster the search engine user will see it.

What is site page relevance?

Typically, each web resource has several pages that contain the answer to a search engine user's query. The search algorithm’s task is to select the most relevant document (website page or blog post). This issue is resolved as follows. The relevance of each page is influenced by a large number of factors. Therefore, to assess the compliance of a web resource document with a search engine user’s request, a total indicator is calculated. Accordingly, the page with the maximum total indicator will be the most suitable and it is this page that the search engine will show to the user. For example, in the following picture you can see a selection from the Yandex search engine of the most relevant pages of my blog for the query “what is site visibility”. The very first document has the maximum total score.

What determines the relevance of a page? Each page of any website is an entire independent element of the Internet. It contains its own content. Basically it is unique, with its own text, pictures, etc. This element interacts with other pages - it provides various links to other pages of your site or to other web resources. And, if possible, it also receives various external links. Therefore, we can say that the relevance of a page for a specific search query is influenced by both internal and external parameters. Plus, the authority of this page is also important. Let's take a closer look at each component.

Internal

Internal or otherwise, textual relevance is the degree to which the internal criteria of a web resource page meet the requirements of search engines. If, in a search query, the words on the page match its form and are the most commonly used, then this document will be considered the most relevant. In other words, we can say this - the closer to the ideal (each system has its own number) the ratio of the number of occurrences of a query to the total number of all words in the text, the higher the document will appear in the search results. Let us list the main parameters by which it is assessed.

Search query frequency in text . This refers to the volume and number of repetitions of a key query on a website page. The closer to the ideal option (I repeat, each search engine has its own figure), the better in terms of assessing the relevance of the document.
Placement of words in headings . If the search query is in the title of the page, then the likelihood of a better rating for this document increases compared to other pages of the web resource. That is, the title tag should contain a key query in its sentence, which will significantly increase the relevance of the page.
Proximity to the top of the page . When a search robot crawls a new page, it follows the code from the very beginning. Therefore, the sooner he encounters a search query on it, the better it is for assessing relevance. Therefore, keywords must be written as early as possible in a website article or blog post.
Presence of keywords in special places in the document . First of all, this refers to the presence of search queries in the title of the article (usually in the h1 tag) and in the subheadings (in the h2 tag - not as important as in h1, but the presence is welcome). Plus the design of search queries in the text in special tags (strong, etc.). And of course, the presence of keywords in the Description (page description) and Keywords meta tags.
Availability of keyword synonyms . A very important element. The presence of synonyms in the page content tells search engines that this document really relates to the topic of the search query, which means it will be most useful to the user. In this way, search engines clean the search results - they do not take into account pages that contain keywords as an addition to other topics and documents that are platforms for most automated promotion systems (RooKee, SeoPult, etc.)

External (reference)

This component is based on the principle of link popularity of a website page. Here the number of links with their texts (anchors) is taken into account. The more links, the better the link relevance. And if the link text contains the user’s key query, the more significant the page becomes. Therefore, it is recommended to always use a search query in the text of links. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s an internal link or an external one—the anchor words matter. The anchor text of the link, which contains the external page of another web resource, is also evaluated. If it is not thematic for the search query, the significance of the link text will be less.

Site authority

the number and quality of external links leading to the site. An important indicator that shows the degree of significance of the site and its pages among other web resources. The higher the quality of the external links (keywords in the anchor and thematic surrounding text) and the more authoritative the donor site (the web resource that provides the external link), the more weight can go to the target page.
site content and content compliance with search queries. The more pages on which a site is promoted that meet the needs of search engine users, the higher the authority of the site. Therefore, for any web resource that is promoted in search engines, two points are most important - the correct composition of the semantic core and the presence of unique optimized content. Even if you have a huge number of external links, it is impossible to promote your site’s landing pages into the top 10 for a long time without good text and a competent set of keywords. Over time, the search engine pessimizes these documents from its results, reducing their relevance by an order of magnitude due to the lack of normal content, taking into account internal optimization.

If a blogger is promoting his web resource in search engines, then the following tips and tricks for improving the relevance of landing pages may be useful to him:

Before promoting landing pages, be sure to correctly select the semantic core of your blog. If you promote landing pages for low-quality search terms, your blog will receive far fewer targeted visitors and more bounces, which will reduce the quality of those pages over time. Check all the parameters of keywords (frequency, word quality, its competitiveness) - this is the key to receiving quality traffic from search engines.
Check new pages in the search results for your key query. For example, you are promoting one page for a specific search query. But after indexing for this keyword, a completely different page appears in the search engine results. This means you need to check all the parameters by which the relevance of the landing page is considered. The following problem may be here - the document is poorly optimized and/or it receives fewer significant external and internal links - the weight of the page is very small compared to the one that appears in the search results.
Increase the authority of your blog. Over time, your site's ranking will increase and the relevance of the landing pages on which your blog is promoted will increase. This will all happen automatically as the popularity of your web resource grows. The VIC and TCI of your site rise, the positions of your site’s pages in Yandex increase (similarly in other search engines).

This concludes my next educational program. Finally, a request to my readers - in the comments of this post, among other things, I would like to know your opinion on the following issues:

How often do you check your landing pages for relevance?
What do you think is missing in my website promotion lessons?
What topic would you like to receive material on in one of the following lessons?

Thank you, friends! See you!

Relevance is the degree to which information is provided according to the user's request. Most often, this word can be found in the work of many people involved in filling out Web sites, creating content, and laying out html pages.

People in the SMM and SMO (content managers) professions actively use this term to create content that will meet the expectations of the user who is looking for it.

Content in search engines is displayed according to the degree of its relevance (i.e., compliance with the request) depending on the number of keywords, “wateriness”, “spammy” and “uniqueness”.

Uniqueness shows how original the existing content is - for example, text copied from Wikipedia and pasted into an article will have reduced uniqueness since it coincides with information already available on the Internet.

Origin of the word relevance

The word relevant (from the English relevare - to understand, to facilitate) comes to us from the scientific field of computer science. The concept of relevance is very important for computer science, since it can relate not only to the field of text analysis and processing, but also when performing practical programming tasks - analyzing large amounts of data.

Relevance (in information technology) is divided into two types: content relevance and formal relevance. Content relevance shows the compliance of the document with the requested data, obtained informally, and formal relevance is based on comparing the user's request to the available information according to a certain algorithm.

These are the algorithms used by search engine robots - Google, Yandex, Rambler. An interesting fact is that each language needs its own unique algorithm that will search for the text the user needs.

Use of the word relevance

The word relevance, as described above, is used in semantics, programming, Web layout, Web design, SMM and SMO, as well as copywriting. Copywriting is a field of work that deals with writing articles to order. Quite often there are articles that will be intended for SEO optimization; this particular type of article should be as relevant as possible.

The word relevance is also found in specialized technical literature - instructions, manuals and other sources of information. In everyday speech, you can also use the word relevance, for example, in situations when a person answers a question in a detached, incorrect way - an irrelevant answer to the question.

Also, relevance can be said to be a measurable value - how relevant is this article or information?

Relevance in SEO

Relevance in SEO is the key to ensuring that your website, blog or community will be found and read by people. The easiest way for a person to find information is to enter a query into a search engine - Google, Yahoo, Rambler or Yandex.

Programs - robots that work in these search engines search for content on request, using special algorithms. Keyword search is one of the simplest and most common.

For a deeper and more accurate, and therefore relevant search in SEO, search programs examine the text stored on the site. The percentage of its “Spaminess” is studied - the frequency of repetition of certain words, “water” - words that do not carry an important semantic load, uniqueness, academic nausea and many other factors that allow the search engine to find relevant content.

Relevance and keywords

In this part of the article, we will give an example of the successful use of keywords so that the reader can best understand how they are used and what we are talking about. Keywords are combinations of words that allow you to capture the most important essence of the text or content.

For example, the keywords in the relevant text will be the following phrases:

“buy goods”;
“buy goods in Moscow”;
“Buy goods in Moscow inexpensively with home delivery”;
“Inexpensive private lawyer services”;
"How to perform a certain action"
“do-it-yourself TV repair at home.”

So we see that keywords and relevance play a huge role in modern life. If relevance did not exist, then there would be no well-functioning Internet.

Try to open the Chinese search engine Badoo and enter a query in Russian - and you will receive completely crazy, completely unexpected, irrelevant content. And although relevance originally came to us from computer science, we still use it in the Russian language, literature, mathematics, physics and other sciences.

When writing a resume or preparing for an important interview, job seekers are increasingly faced with the concept of “relevant work experience.” What does this mean?

In today's article we will look into this issue, and also find out in which cases the presence of this most relevant experience can become an obstacle to obtaining a position, and when it is a prerequisite for employment.

Concept

The word “relevance” came into Russian from English. This borrowing can be literally translated as “appropriate.” The practical use of this term is not very widespread; it is most often used in highly specialized areas.

So, naturally and logically, the adjective “relevant” characterizes words such as “question”, “document”, “market” and “information”.

For example, the terms “relevant question” and “relevant information” are very close and follow from each other. They are used when it is necessary to achieve the truth in a certain matter. When asking a relevant question, we expect to hear an appropriate answer, the information of which will reveal the essence of the problem as accurately and appropriately as possible. It is in this vein that the phrase “relevant work experience” is easiest to explain. We will look into what this means in more detail later.

Now let's talk about what a relevant document is. We actually encounter this concept several times a day when we use various search engines. When entering a specific request on the Internet, we ask a specific question to which we want to receive the most correct and comprehensive answer. The search engine selects the most relevant (corresponding to the request) Internet pages (documents) for users.

In the context of market relations, the term under discussion means the harmonious interaction of sellers and buyers in a particular area.

Relevance to work experience

No one will argue that having practical skills to perform duties in a particular field of work is a serious advantage for any applicant. It’s even better when the experience is confirmed by a real recommendation from a past employer or a corresponding entry in the work book.

This is how a potential boss can check for relevant work experience. This will happen even if the candidate for the vacant position is not aware of such selection criteria. Although most often employers indicate this point in their requirements.

So what is relevant work experience? This is the compliance of the professional and personal qualities of the applicant with the requirements for a candidate for an open vacancy.

Based on this definition, it may be believed that relevant work experience is when a candidate can take a position only if he has already been employed in a similar job and performed exclusively the same functions that he will have to do in the new place.

In fact, we are talking about the fact that the applicant has an idea about future work, and has previously worked, if not in the same field, then at least in a related field of activity. Now we will understand these subtleties in more detail.

Conformity does not mean identity

There are generally accepted job descriptions for specialists. These documents define the sphere of influence of employees, their rights, responsibilities, and extent of responsibility, but only in general terms. Depending on what exactly the company does, the job descriptions of its employees may have certain nuances and additions.

In reality, employers cannot expect that a newly hired employee will fully meet their requirements. It’s good if he has relevant work experience, this can be included in the vacancy as one of the requirements. But many headhunters refuse this point, especially in those areas of activity for which in our country specialists are not trained at a sufficiently professional level in universities.

Why is this important?

Well, at least because it usually facilitates the training process for the hired employee, and also reduces the period of his adaptation to the new place.

But what does relevant work experience mean for those enterprises that work with innovative technologies? Often he becomes a kind of stopper for a novice subordinate who is accustomed to working according to certain programs and parameters.

At the same time, there are areas of activity and positions whose development is not subject to frequent changes, but they require people to have a high level of professionalism and qualifications, as well as certain situational work experience, and the ability to respond quickly in force majeure conditions. First of all, this nuance applies to managers and personnel who are directly responsible for their work (sales people, crisis managers, specialists from procurement departments, controllers, etc.).

They know first-hand what relevant work experience means in practice. After all, in their line of work they have to overcome crisis situations, and this skill is highly valued by employers.

Let us note that what is more important here is not so much any entry in the work book, but the ability to competently and constructively cope with problems.

Primary Requirement

During employment, many applicants become aware of the fact that there are vacancies in which relevant work experience is a prerequisite. What does this mean - the end of the dream of being, for example, a practicing surgeon (after all, no one will be given a scalpel in their hands without experience) or a referee of football matches? Not at all!

Yes, there are types of activities that a priori require the applicant to have practical knowledge and skills (medicine, construction, personnel management). People “from the street” are not hired for this kind of work. Any specialist employed in such a responsible position will undergo a multi-month internship. He will have to constantly confirm his professional suitability, assist and help more experienced colleagues. But with due diligence and receiving a specialized education, such a job can be earned.

Main course

If we talk about relevant work experience in simple terms, what does it mean? This means that you must be able to do the job you are applying for. Drawing an analogy, we can put it this way: a tiler knows how to lay tiles, but will not be able to build a house, and an electrician will install wiring, but will not install plumbing. All these types of activities fall under the category of “construction and repair work,” but involve the performance of individual tasks by different people who will have specific knowledge and skills.

At the same time, a financier will be able to retrain as an economist or accountant, and a sales manager will be able to climb the career ladder, taking the position of head of the sales department or supervisor.

Employers often require relevant work experience, but at the same time give a person a chance to slightly change the direction of his activity and try himself in a different direction, while remaining true to his profession.

Hitting the mark

If the applicant can boast of real experience in a position similar to the one he wants to get in a new job, he is in an advantageous position for himself.

Periodically changing employers is useful for a specialist in many respects. This forces a person to leave his comfort zone, get moving, and learn something new.

However, it should be taken into account that some industries have extremely limited demand for specialists, so there may be serious competition among applicants. Employers often use this situation to their advantage, deliberately increasing the requirements for hired personnel.

HR opinion

Recruitment specialists, or, as they are now more often called, HR and headhunters, note that applicants should not blindly rely on their work experience when searching for a vacancy. This fact of their work history can be both an advantage and a disadvantage.

Being able to do something in reality is good, but most large companies are developing so dynamically that professionals from the old cohort very quickly become unclaimed “dinosaurs” in the labor market. It is sometimes easier for HR officers to train a young specialist than to retrain an old one.

Moreover, serious competitive companies, based on their own intellectual resources, organize express trainings, schools and internship courses for those who want to join the ranks of their employees, thereby providing themselves with valuable personnel who can quickly and effectively comprehend all the intricacies of future work.

In this context, it becomes clear that relevant work experience is such an archaic concept that sometimes interferes with finding a job.

Risk is a noble cause!

To summarize the article, I would like to note that practical work experience is certainly a plus for those who are looking for a job. But its absence should not become a serious stumbling block and an insurmountable obstacle to achieving the goal. Experience comes with time, the main thing is to work on yourself, and never stop learning and developing!

Relevance– the degree to which search results correspond to the expectations of the user who submitted the search query. The effectiveness of the search engine is judged by the degree of relevance of the search results. How relevant this or that information is to a request is determined by the search algorithm. In the simplest approximation, the relevance of a page is determined by the ratio of the number of times keywords included in a search query are used on a site page to the total volume of text. Each system has its own percentage of occurrence of a search phrase in the text, which indicates the high relevance of the page. On average it is 5%. Fewer search phrases may be ignored by the search engine. More than that may fall under the restrictions of the search engine spam filter with all the ensuing consequences.

Description

With the development of the Internet, search engines began to play a leading role. Thanks to their algorithms, users could quickly access any information. However, the rapid increase in the number of sites also began to give rise to the problem of choice. Since one user request could return up to several thousand sites, among which there were both high-quality and low-quality ones, search engines were forced to develop the principle of relevance, allowing them to select for users the most suitable documents for their conditions.

Initially, the relevance of pages was determined by internal criteria: the density of keywords in the text, the occurrence of keywords in the title, meta tags, text design elements and many others. However, after the appearance of doorways optimized for these requirements, there was a need to develop external parameters that determine the site’s compliance with the entered request. As an example describing this process, consider the following formula:

R=PR*(T+L); where: R – relevance value; T – degree of compliance of internal criteria with the requirements specified by search engines (text relevance); L – level of link ranking - the degree of correspondence of the texts of incoming links to a document to the search query (link relevance); PR is an indicator of external document criteria that do not depend on the request (the authority of the resource).

This formula is not an exact reflection of the work of modern search engine ranking algorithms, but it gives an idea of the significance and types of criteria that make up the relevance of pages.

Internal Relevance Criteria

The most significant internal criterion of relevance is keywords, namely their frequency in the text. Search engines are able to calculate this parameter and, if a phrase is repeated frequently, consider it a key phrase. If, during a user request, the phrases found on the page correspond to its form and are key, that is, frequently used, the site will be considered relevant.

Keywords also have a big impact on their location. First of all, this is their presence in various headings. If a user's query matches the title of a document, the search engine is more likely to rank that page more than others. Additional factors influencing the weight of keywords also include:

Close to the top of the page. The closer to the top of the page a keyword is, the more significant it is.
The presence of keywords in some places on the page. For example, in headings, meta tags, text design tags.
The proximity of keywords to each other. It matters when any phrase, especially a stable phrase, acts as a search query.
Availability of keyword synonyms. Search engines often pay attention to the presence of other forms of keywords in texts, indicating that the documents actually deal with a given topic.

External Relevance Criteria

The basis of external relevance criteria is the principle of citation or reference popularity. This factor implies that the relevance of a site can be determined by its popularity on the Internet, that is, the number of other resources linking to the page in question. The higher their number, the greater the authoritative weight of the site, and, therefore, the information presented on it is of higher quality.

Each of the search engines uses its own algorithm for determining the level of citations, but they all have a similar mechanism of action and, in fact, act as a modification of the world’s first algorithm that takes into account the number of