define:segmentation – The process of dividing into segments
May 11th, 2011 by David J
Page segmentation in search engine optimisation means that search engines take a more granular approach to analysing different parts of a web document. When a search engine looks at a web page, it wants to see what the document is really about and separate the clutter from the meat of the web page.
For example, a website may have a typical layout that involves the header, the body, the navigation area and the footer. The content in the header, navigational area and the footer typically changes very little across a website in comparison to the body content. So a search engine might regard signals with less value to the information in these segments than to the content in the body segment.
In fact I bet that the search engines rank each segment as a subset of the web page. In other words in our example, the content may be reordered in importance of: body, navigation, header and footer. But that’s just my theory, and I’m sure it’s far more complex and it definitely requires testing.
So what’s the future with page segmentation for SEO? Well HTML 5 incorporates page segmentation tags into it to facilitate search engines discovering and ranking the correct value to each section of a webpage. These new tags will make an SEO practitioners life much more bountiful when the search engines start making good and proper use of them.
Although HTML 5 is here but not fully developed or supported, it’s something we should be planning to get familiar with in the up coming 3 or so years. Currently it’s being pushed through by the W3C and is expected to be with us in 2014 – perhaps we should start following the specifications now?
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Agreed, the page segmentation gives the search engine a chance to parse the page in very granular way, thus help to build the authority of the site.