Entities · Glossary
What is entity salience?
Entity salience is a measure of how central an entity is to a piece of text compared with the other entities it mentions. Google's Cloud Natural Language API reports it as a score between 0 and 1.0 for each entity it detects.
Written by Noor KhanWhy Entity salience matters
A page can mention the right entity and still read as being about something else. When the main entity is buried under brand history, locations and side topics, search engines and AI systems get a weaker signal about what the page answers.
How Entity salience works
- Natural language tools identify every entity in a text and estimate how much of the text concerns each one.
- Entities named in the title, headings and as the subject of sentences read as more central than ones mentioned in passing.
- Salience is relative to the other entities in the same text, so it describes focus, not quality.
How to apply it
- Name the main entity in the title, H1 and first sentence, as the grammatical subject.
- Refer to it by name at the start of sections instead of 'it' or 'this'.
- Cut tangents about secondary entities that don't help answer the page's question.
- Run key pages through an entity analysis tool and check which entity comes out on top.
Example
A SaaS page meant for 'HIPAA-compliant scheduling software' opens with the company's founding story and investors, so the company outweighs the product. Moving the scheduling product and its HIPAA safeguards into the H1 and first paragraph makes the product the page's central entity.
Common mistake
Repeating the entity name to raise a salience score. The score is a diagnostic for focus; the fix is clearer writing about the entity.
put this into practice