Find related entities from Wikipedia
Understanding entities is now considered an essential skill for any SEO. They allow search engines to easily understand a web page, how it fits in with the rest of your website and the internet overall. This feeds into Google's knowledge graph, which organises all the content in its index to provide the most relevant search results.
Wikipedia is a rich resource for understanding and identifying entities. So how can we find topics related to your page? Well, Wikipedia has a great source for this.
Click "Tools" in the top right, then "What links here" as shown in the screenshot below:
Next you'll see a list of all the Wikipedia pages which link to this page, as shown below (thanks to Mike Friedman for the tip).
Since each Wikipedia page is it's own entity, this is a list of entities which are relevant to your topic. This is a goldmine of information for the following reasons:
- It can be used for content ideation
- It tells you what subjects are relevant for the topic you're writing about
- It can provide valuable topic research that you may not have known about
Of course, common sense comes in to play here. Do not just blindly follow the list of entities and shoe horn them into your content. Many will not be relevant for the topic you're writing about. These should only be used as a guide to assist you along your way.
Whilst this is great, its also time consuming. Wouldn't it be great if you could just take a list of topics and generate a list of related entities using this data? Well, keep reading.
Find related entities in bulk
I have created a Google Sheet which takes a list of topics and checks if there is a matching wikiepdia page. It will then extract the related entities as described above. See below for a screenshot:
Just enter your list of topics and fill down the formulas in columns B and C and watch your list of entities generate before your eyes! If your topic does not have a wikipedia page then the sheet will tell you and you can see if any related topics are present for you to try again.
Interested? Try it for yourself - click here!
Have a play around and let me know what you think on Twitter/X/whatever its called.