Extending topic modeling past content into SEO — Natasha Ghosh // Riot Games

Natasha Ghosh, SEO Manager at Riot Games, delves into topic modeling and structured data. Search engines like Google use topic modeling to understand what topics are on a webpage and rank that page in search results. For SEOs, topic modeling offers an opportunity to align their content strategy with search algorithms, enhancing visibility and rankings in search engine results pages. Today, Natasha discusses expanding topic modeling into technical SEO.
About the speaker

Natasha Ghosh

Riot Games

 is a little camera shy

Natasha is SEO Manager at Riot Games

Show Notes

  • 02:11
    SEO at Riot Games
    SEO at Riot Games focuses on providing a seamless search experience for players across all their websites from game downloads to contacting support. Theres an enthusiasm for tech and related topics within the gaming industry, fostering an eagerness to adopt SEO practices.
  • 03:56
    Gaming SEO and the interconnected nature of search practices
    Gaming SEO aligns closely with other SEO teams, prioritizing a seamless search experience. SEO collaborates with paid search and app store optimization teams recognizing that search extends beyond the search engine.
  • 04:53
    Topic modeling in SEO
    Topic modeling is a natural language processing technique that identifies and organizes topics within large volumes of text. It establishes relationships between headings, subheadings, URLs, and keywords, informing website design and structure while helping to detect duplicate content.
  • 07:50
    The integration of topic modeling in SEO tools
    Many third-party SEO tools integrate topic modeling into their crawling and analysis processes. Recent advancements emphasize not only page structure but also the comprehensive organization of content across entire websites.
  • 09:27
    How topic modeling fits into the AI world
    Topic modeling is a type of AI and machine learning that helps machines analyze a corpus of text. By understanding how the model works, SEOs can effectively organize website topics, avoid duplicate content, and optimize for search engine indexing and ranking.
  • 12:24
    The significance of topic modeling in SEO
    LDA, one of the algorithms under topic modeling, identifies relationships between topics and words within documents. In SEO, it guides keyword placement on pages and aids in understanding our site's keyword relationships and how competitors are relating keywords.
  • 15:24
    The importance of topic modeling in technical SEO
    Topic modeling aids in reorganizing content for improved web vitals and ensures mobile-first optimization. During site migrations and audits, it's also useful for reorganizing backend content and asset dams to ensure assets are living in the right folders under the correct categorizations.
  • 18:40
    The applicability of topic modeling for different types of websites
    Topic modeling isn't exclusive to large websites; it's valuable for bloggers and moderate-sized sites. It aids in internal linking strategies, ensuring meaningful connections between topics and pages and optimizing how search engines perceive relationships through follow and nofollow internal links.
  • 21:07
    HTML and topic modeling
    Since the BERT update, topic modeling's relevance has surged, emphasizing keyword relationships and content structure. In addition to strong content, ensuring good HTML on your pages is crucial for search engines to understand content relationships and relevance.

Quotes

  • "We should be using topic modeling to understand the relationship between keywords that appear on our websites, but also to understand how other websites and competitors are using those relationships." - Natasha Ghosh"We organized the entire asset dam on our site, sticking all the media under specific folders with clear names and categorizations. That helped us increase our rankings across the site without touching anything else." - Natasha Ghosh

  • "Topic modeling is incredibly important if you have a blog or a moderate-sized website because one of the things it informs is internal linking." - Natasha Ghosh

  • "My 2018 blog post on topic modeling continues to rank well today because I looked at other websites use of keywords and what the connection was. And then I made sure that the HTML and content on the page were strong." - Natasha Ghosh

  • "For people working on a page, writing a blog post, or working on a microscopic level, remembering the HTML, how a search engine is looking at the HTML, and parsing it is where topic modeling comes into play." - Natasha Ghosh

About the speaker

Natasha Ghosh

Riot Games

 is a little camera shy

Natasha is SEO Manager at Riot Games

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