Neo4j for SEO & UX: Easily create related content

Improving your UX and SEO for your website takes time and effort. You need to give your content some context to help your readers and the search engines understand what it's about. What if you could automate this and do more with the same amount of effort?

3 months ago, I've written about using Neo4j, a Graph Database, for SEO and UX purposes. Neo4j might be complete overkill for the relatively small amount of data I put in it, but it has boosted my own productivity and internal link building strategy. Here's why!

Generating internal links

With a Graph database, you can make...well graphs. By linking pieces of content together, I've created a large cob web of content with dependencies, as you can see in this screenshot:

Neo4j screenshot of Plant care for Beginners content

As you can see, there are many, many connections between pieces of content. Each of these connections means that a piece of content is related to another piece of content. You can see where I'm going with this right? These connections help me to related page, which creates a giant web of internal links. These internal links help search engines to make sense of your content and give it context.

In a way, you're helping these search engines provide some context to your content. You don't need a database like Neo4j for this at all, you can do this manually as well. But it makes it a whole lot easier. By having a Graph database in place, which focuses on relationships between nodes (Plant, Article, Page, etc), you can quickly generate relevant internal content.

Content ideas are easier

If you've written a lot of content for a longer period of time, you'll know this feeling: "What do I write about now?". With a graph database, this becomes much easier.

If you can't think of anything to write about, you can start connecting the circles in the screenshot from earlier. Say you have Page A and Page B, they're great pages, but they have nothing in common, nothing connecting to them. You can now draw a line between Page A and Page B, which is called Page C and it'll serve as the common ground.

Before, you couldn't link from Page A to Page B, because they we're so different, but now you can link to it indirectly. You can link from Page A to Page C and then to Page B and vice versa. You've created content context, which is great for your readers, but also for the search engines trying to make sense of your website.

Automate your work

Again, you can do all of these things by hand. But doing this takes a lot of time and you will miss some connections that might be obvious to an automated system, You want great UX, you want great SEO, but you'll need great content for that. If you spend all your time manually creating connections between pieces of content, you'll never have time to actually write that content.

If you use Neo4j for your content, it will probably be massive overkill, but it will improve your workflow. At least it has for me. My normal writing process hasn't changed at all, but the impact it has on UX and SEO has been far greater. And that with the same effort as before.