What is relevance? Definition

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

This term has existed for a long time, although it has been used relatively recently, with the active development of the Internet in all spheres of life. However, understanding what relevance is is not as difficult as it seems. We regularly define it on this or that page, without even thinking about what it is called.

How to understand a difficult term

To understand what relevance is, a concept from the English language will help. The word relevant is translated as "relevant" or one that is relevant. The meaning is well revealed in the phrase relevant testimony, which means “information on the essence of the matter.”

In simple terms, what is relevance? This is a match to the user's request. The higher this indicator on the page, the better it should reveal the topic. That is, if after reading this article you have understood well what relevance is, then the publication corresponds to the request and, accordingly, it is relevant. It remains only to settle the technical points of the text.

To fully understand what isrelevance, you can take an example from life. A tourist has arrived in an unfamiliar city, and he needs to know how to get to the desired hotel. If the passer-by explained everything intelligibly, showed the route on the map, and the traveler quickly and without problems reached the building he was looking for - the answer of the local resident was relevant to the question asked.

What is relevance for?

The Internet is a bottomless dump of a huge number of different articles and sites, and this list is constantly updated. Every second, thousands of users come to this heap and try to find information on a wide variety of topics. In order for each person entering the request to receive the most accurate answer to the question of interest to him, and relevance is needed.

What is this, in a simple example with a tourist it will be easier to understand. If a traveler asks for directions not from one resident, but from five or ten, almost all of them will talk about different ways to get to the hotel. This does not mean that there is only one correct advice. It’s just that there are really many options to get to your destination: metro, different route numbers, taxis, “short” walking routes, etc. On the Internet, you will get much more options for solving problems.

Perception of relevant article by users

And if instead of a detailed route to the hotel, the tourist receives a thick guide and a wish for a good journey? Even if there is an answer in the book, the traveler is unlikely to be satisfied, since he asked to save precious time. Now you have to spend a certain number of minutes searching for the rightpage or another advisor.

If the site has an answer to the question asked, it does not automatically become relevant. Imagine if this page had a towel of multi-page text with no structure at all. You definitely would not have read this far if there was at least super-information here. The user follows the path of least resistance: it is difficult to find an answer, there are many other resources where it will be easier to do this.

In order to make a site relevant, you need to figure out what criteria affect its evaluation by both users and search engines. With people, everything is more or less clear. We all expect an article to be:

• Easy to understand, informative and readable.
• With a clear structure: had paragraphs, subheadings and, if necessary, lists.
• Competently written. It is difficult and unpleasant for an educated person to wade through the jungle of mistakes. And even without knowing punctuation, spelling, grammar and style, one feels a bad style.
• With a well developed theme.

How search engines evaluate relevance

A search engine, unlike a real person, cannot evaluate the material on the above grounds. In order to provide the user with answers that are most relevant to the query, she needs to evaluate the technical compliance of each page and the behavior of visitors on the page.

Big role insearch engine relevancy plays:

• Correct matching of keywords to title and content.
• The uniqueness of the text.
• Competent technical design of the content.
• No repetition of a lot of text from page to page.

The external relevance of the article

External relevance is one that is regulated independently of the content of the article or site itself. This indicator depends on the number of article recommendations on other resources. That is, the more often a link to a page is found on third-party sites, the higher the system evaluates the usefulness of the information. Moreover, the higher the rating of the article that placed the link, the more it affects relevance. An important factor is the name of the link, which must have a name that matches the request. Everything is like in life: you are more likely to use the services of the professional who is advised more often and by more reputable sources.

The external relevance of a site is affected by the number of relevant articles on it. If the site is dedicated to computer technology, but most of the articles on it are about humor, games and repairs, the system will lower the rating of the resource, advising it to an ever smaller number of visitors.

Relevant page internals

Internal relevance depends on the content of the article, without the intervention of outside "advisers". This indicator is regulated using keywords.

Let's look at the basic rules for using keywords.

• How muchfrequently used phrase in the text. More recently, search engines have welcomed the highest possible concentration of keywords in the text. Some authors of articles, obeying this rule, began to write absolutely unreadable texts, consisting of a heap of keywords. Now search engines evaluate the ratio to the number of words. Each system uses its own indicators. Articles that are too spammy are filtered out.
• The use of a key phrase in the title of the article is welcome.
• Location of the search query closer to the beginning of the article. Scanning of text occurs sequentially from the very beginning. That is, the closer to the beginning the word is located, the faster it is recognized. That is why the keyword at the beginning of the article is more likely to increase relevance.
• Correct formatting of the search query. In addition to being mentioned in the title and beginning of the article, it is important to add appropriate tags when laying out the page.
• Presence in the article of synonyms for keywords. By evaluating all content, search engines determine whether an article matches the given keywords. Sites that use keywords inserted without proper surroundings by words that are close in meaning are lowered by systems in search results.

How to conduct a relevance analysis

It is unlikely that the user will like a well-written article, taking into account all the technical features, but at the same time, not fully revealing the topic or hard to read. So start checkingrelevance from testing it on living people. If you have managed to explain the topic to a person or group of people, you can move on. As a last resort, it is good enough to re-read the article yourself, but in this case it will be more difficult to evaluate the usefulness of the content.

Sufficient number of online services have been created to check the technical relevance. Consider the main resources:

• Majento is the most popular online service. In the field on the left, a link to the page is entered, and on the right, a search query to determine its relevance to the article.
• Megaindex checks the morphology and makes a technical analysis of the article. To check, you need to go to the "page relevance" tab.
• PR-CY gives a general idea of the content structure as search engines see it.
• Seolib allows you to evaluate the entire site at once, select its most relevant pages. This takes into account certain search queries. It also includes a standard page relevance check. It is possible to download a list prepared in advance in.txt or.csv format.
• Serpstat in the test report shows the relevance of the word, or what keywords to add to increase the indicator.

Unfortunately, no online service is able to analyze an article or site as well as a search engine. It is necessary to take into account a very large number of various indicators for such primitive programs. To get a more complete picture, you need to evaluate content logically and use several resources for verification.at the same time.

Reasons why an article is not relevant

It's not certain that the most technically relevant pages will be the most useful in terms of content. Sites on the first page of a search are also not necessarily the most relevant. But there are rules due to the neglect of which the relevance of the site can be significantly reduced.

• Do not use non-unique texts on the site.
• Directly disregarding the match between search queries and the content of the article will have a detrimental effect on the rating.
• Do not post false or outdated information.
• Keyword spamming will not increase the relevance of the article, but will harm.

When creating and promoting a website or an article, you should not use only one method, forgetting about the others. Success is possible only with an integrated approach.