As businesses constantly strive to make their web content more accessible, they increasingly find themselves seeking the help of SEO professionals. However, the SEO arena has changed in recent years and what used to be the norm a few years ago has no place at work today.
One of the newest trends in the realm of SEO is web mining. This rapidly growing research area consists of web usage mining, web structure mining and web content mining. Web usage mining refers to the analysis of user access patterns on usage logs. The structure of hyperlinks, which is crucial to SEO is studied under web structure mining. Finally, web content mining helps SEO professionals to analyze information and trends using web page content.
What is web content mining and why do we need to understand it?
Though web content mining is related to data and text mining, it is fundamentally different from the two. Web data is either semi-structured or not structured at all. Data mining analyses structured data, whereas, text mining analyses unstructured data. Web content mining, on the other hand, analyses the semi-structured quality of the web. By using creative applications to mine semi-structured data on the web, SEO professionals can easily understand where they need to focus, which keywords they must target and why certain pages are not receiving enough traffic, in spite of having great content.
What are the different kinds of web content mining?
Web content mining can be differentiated under two broad categories: Database View and Information Retrieval View. Database View helps analysts to arrive at better information management. It also helps them with querying on the web by trying to analyze the structure of the website and transforming it entirely into a database itself.
On the other hand, Information Retrieval View analyses both unstructured and semi-structured data. Studies reveal that most searches consist of a bag of words or a key phrase. These key phrases help people at arriving on pages that are distinctly textual in nature. For semi-structured data, HTML structures inside the documents are used.
Some of the most important techniques in web content mining are:
It is important for SEO professionals to know that web content mining can yield very important information. It tells them what topics need to be given attention to and how clients can build their web copy to make sure that they are reaching the right target audience. Modern software makes it much easier to engage in web content mining than it used to be, a few years ago. If SEO consultants spend a little time trying to understand the various web content mining software programs available today, it will not only help them to gain knowledge but will also help in growing their businesses.
