Salience Score Calculator

Enter Text: Calculate Salience

 
 

How to use the Entity Salience Score Calculator

To get the salience scores for the entities in your text, simply input your text in the text area above and click “Calculate Salience.”

You will then get a list with salience scores for each entity. 

Please note that not all words are entities. This is why you will also not get scores for each and every word in your text. 

Instead of writing the text in the text box by yourself, you can obviously also just paste text in there from any source. 

Salience Score Explanation

Salience scores range from 0 to 1.

A salience score of 0 means that an entity is not “salient” at all. 

A salience score of 1 means that an entity has the maximum salience. 

With that said, the closer the score of an entity is to 0, the LESS important it is for the text. 

On the other hand, the closer the score of an entity is to 1, the MORE important it is for the text. 

Entity Salience and SEO

When it comes to the rankings of websites, SEO is the holy grail. 

There are so many ranking factors, though, that it is hard to keep track. 

One thing that is for sure, though, is that Semantic SEO is getting more and more critical. 

When we talk about Semantic SEO, then what we mean with that with regards to SEO is that Google is obviously trying very hard to understand what content on websites is really about.

So, in easier words, they are trying to understand the true nature and the true meaning of all the words, sentences and paragraphs that make up our articles. 

Sounds easy?

Well, it’s not. 

One way for Google to better understand the semantics of website content is to use Natural Language Processing Tools (= NLP tools.)

Google actually has their own NLP Toolkit. 

And within that toolkit, one important aspect is salience or let’s say the salience score. 

Now, what is salience exactly? 

In basic terms, salience is the importance or relevance of an entity in a text. 

So what is an entity?

Google defines an entity as “Represents a phrase in the text that is a known entity, such as a person, an organization, or location. “

In most cases, entities are therefore nouns. 

Also worth noting is that entities are often placed at the beginning of the sentence. But not always. And if they are not, their salience score usually decreases drastically. 

Improve the Salience of Your Keywords within the Text

A great way to use salience scores is to use them to increase the importance of your keywords within the text. 

For instance, if your main keyword is “Cat food”, it is to your advantage if “Cat food” has the highest salience in the whole text (or at least within a paragraph or a sentence.)

This is where our Salience Calculator comes in very handy because all you need to do to find out what entities have the highest salience in your text about “Cat food” would be to enter the text in the text area above and then click on “Calculate Salience.”

Here’s an example:

Now, let’s imagine that our main keyword is “Cat food” and that is what we would like to rank for. In this case, our input text does a very bad job, because “people” actually has higher salience than “cat food” in our text. 

This means that the search engine, be it Google or any other, will regard the entity “people” as more important than “cat food” in our text. And that is obviously not at all what we want. 

So, take a second to think about….

How could we improve the salience score for “cat food” to make it more important in our text?

And then the answer here, and very often in general, is to put the entity that is most important to you (= the keyword(s) that you would like to rank for, in our case “cat food”) at the very beginning of the sentence. This will typically increase the salience of that entity. 

So let us switch things up and then check the salience scores again. We now changed our example into: