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[FEATURE SUGGESTIONS] Title, Hn, content... Ideas to skyrocket GSA CG

MinidouMinidou France
edited October 2020 in GSA Content Generator
Hello @Sven, hello everybody,

GSA CG is a very good tool, but the possibilities for optimizing the structure of the articles are a bit limited.
There are several options to give granularity to the content (lists, HTML decorations, images, videos, etc...), but I think that some improvements are needed which would allow major advances.
I will try to structure my thinking as much as possible, sorry in advance if the text is massive.

Not everything may be good to take, or would require too much work. That said, perhaps these ideas could serve as inspiration for future updates, highlighting some limitations of the tool that can be corrected to propel it far beyond what the competitors offers.

I took a long time to think about these features, doing some tests and checking what work/what doesn't in the current state of the tool. I believe these changes are the number 1 priority for GSA CG to really shine.

Titles


At the moment, the tool allows us to scrap the content via keywords that we provide to the tool in the "input" tab.
These keywords are also integrated into the content via titles, Hn tags or simply in the content directly, if I understand correctly. But, the way it works at the moment, make it so that it's not optimized.
Moreover, because of this positioning, the customization of titles is currently a little limited.

Here is an example of what I have in mind to improve the tool. 

- Let's say I have a list of keywords revolving around the smartphone theme: "Samsung Galaxy S20", "Huawei P30", "Xiaomi Mi Note 10", etc...
In parallel, I have a list of longtails words if I can name them that way (the word is incorrect but that's all I can think of to describe the concept), which would be for example ": Review - Where to buy ?", "Review - How much does it cost ?", "Shopping guide - Discount code", "Best price - Black Friday", etc...

I want to mix these lists.
Let's say I want to produce titles like this : "Samsung Galaxy S8: Review - Price".
This title would have been generated by mixing my list of "title keywords" AND my list of "longtails keywords".

But in order to do so, a field would have to be set up for this purpose, in the Output tab for instance.

- To make it even more powerful, there could be 2 extra fields where these "longtails" keywords could also be inserted;
before AND/OR after the title keywords. Let's name these fields "Beginning of title" and "End of title" for the sake of it.

For example : [Where to buy] [title keyword] [at the cheapest price]
"Where to buy" would be one of the sentences taken from the newly created "Beginning of title" field, while "at the cheapest price" would be a sentence written in the "End of title" field.

The potential is infinite and would really boost the potential for title personalization.


- Also, we could add an option to mix the "title keywords" between themselves (which would work either in parallel with the longtails or separately, depending if the user wants to).
For example : [title keyword] [:] [title keyword]
(+ add the possibility to customize the separator)

Titles being a strategic element to say the least, I think that this feature can bring an important added value.
Of course, if the user just want to keep their scrapped titles as is, they could have an option to do so.

Hn tags


In the same spirit, Hn tags deserve love. As it is, the keywords placed in the Input tab are used to build the Hn, but the way it is managed brings redundancy in the content.

To overcome this problem, here are a few ideas:


- H1: Add the possibility to insert the first title keyword inside the H1 (without the "longtails keyword" feature I mentioned above, therefore) and to add additional variations to it, before or after here again, so that the H1 would not be strictly identical to the title (which wouldn't bring much).

I specified "first" title keyword because in my last suggestion from the Title paragraph, I proposed the possibility to mix several title keywords between themselves... Not to complicate things even further, I think the generated content should focus on one keyword, and that keyword should be the first title keyword (used to create the article).

Example : My article has "Samsung Galaxy S8: Review - Price" for title.
"Samsung Galaxy S8" is my title keyword, ": Review - Price" are the longtails keywords inserted after the title, following the method described earlier.
Instead of having "Samsung Galaxy S8" as H1, the tool would search a sentence in the newly created fields (which would either be the "Before" of "After" fields), dedicated to spinning the H1. Let's say I have inserted a few lines in the "After" field, and that the tool take "~ Where to buy it".
I would end up with "Samsung Galaxy S8 ~ Where to buy it" as H1, and "Samsung Galaxy S8: Review - Price" as title.


- H2/H3: In fact, here again, the principle remain the same: Add the possibility to insert the first title keyword inside the H2/H3, from time to time, and add other keywords before/after it.

Of course this time it would not be necessary for the title keyword to be systematically used (elseway every H2/H3 would look the same) ; there could be, for example, a way to adjust the frequency of appearance of this title keyword in the H2/H3.

For example, by setting this newly created field to 33%, the title keyword would be inserted in one third of all H2/H3. For more control, you would need one field for H2, and one for H3.


- In addition to the frequency of appearance of the title keyword in H2/H3, it would be interesting to be able to mix several keywords together, in the same spirit developped earlier in the Title paragraph (with separators that could be defined in a separate field).
Example: "[keyword] [and] [keyword]".


- Finally, another suggestion is the ability to set the minimum/maximum number of H2/H3 in the article.


The idea behind these modifications would be to highlight the first title keyword by inserting it in the Hn, which would give it more weight.

Content


- Still in order to increase the power of the title keyword, it should be possible to define a frequency of appearance for this keyword in the content, and according to the size of the article.

For example: 1% for an article up to 1000 words; 0.5% for an article up to 2000 words; etc...
It would be up to the user to define the limits in terms of the size of the article.


- As for the size of the article, it is currently calculated according to the values entered in "Paragraphs per Article" and "Words per Paragraph".

It would be interesting to decorrelate the size of the article from this data, because as it stands, if I want to have articles of 1000 to 3000 words but containing paragraphs between 30 and 400 words, with between 5 and 15 paragraphs, the tool will output texts of 150 to 6300 words.
This is either not enough or too much compared to my objective from the example cited above.

By setting a minimum and maximum limit to the size of articles, uncorrelated to the values entered in the fields mentioned above, it would force the tool to produce content within strict limits and would give me more control over the final rendering.

Of course, if the values entered conflict with each other, an error message should be displayed to warn the user (for example, if I ask the tool to produce an article of at least 1500 words, while at the same time I ask it to produce only between 1 and 2 paragraphs, between 50 and 400 words...).

Lists (<ol>, <ul>, <li>)


There is not much to say here. Lists are very useful, but it would be great to add an option to specify how many lists you want per articles, for example between 1 and 3 lists per articles.


Decorations


We have several possibilities to embellish the content.

My suggestions are mainly focus on the keywords, and how to highlight them.

Currently, we can put them in Bold via the "Decorate keywords as bold in article" option, which is already very good.

My suggestion would be to be able to add an option to also put in Bold the words preceding or succeeding the keyword, within limits that we could define.

For example: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor".

If "dolor" is a keyword, and I ask the tool to put the 0-2 words before the keyword in Bold, and the 0-2 words after in Bold, I could end up with : "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor".

I believe this would make the formatting a little more natural, while keeping the importance of having a keyword in Bold.


- In the same vein, add the possibility to do the same with Italic/Underline (even if these options weigh less in terms of SEO, it adds a bit of naturalness to the text).


- If these suggestions are taken into account, there should be an option to weight the frequency of appearance of Bold, Italic and Underline on the keywords (for example, 80-90% use of Bold, 5-15% use of Italic, 5-15% use of Underline).


- Finally, keep the possibility to modify the Bold, Italic, Underline tags, as it is already possible in "HTML Variations" via the "Edit/Add Variations" option. I prefer to use <strong> over <b>, so it's important to keep this possibility.


Thoughts on how to integrate these changes


The integration of some of these features can be problematic from a UX point of view.

I have thought long and hard about the implications of these changes.

I don't have a perfect solution to propose, but maybe the following could be a workable lead ?


My idea is the following: Add 2 new fields in the "Input" tab: Title Keywords, and Content Keywords. As for the existing "Keyword(s)" field, it would become a "Scrap Keywords" field.

So we would end up with 3 fields.

I made a picture to better visualize the concept.


By segmenting the fields in this way, we would have :

- Scrap Keywords, which would be used to generate the content from the scrapped data, like how the current "Keyword(s)" field work ;

- Keywords to generate the titles and Hn (if the field is left empty, the "scrap keywords" will be used). The tool would take one keyword from the list and build an article with this specific keyword in the title, Hn and content (following the ideas proposed above) ;

- Keywords that would be inserted in the content, in order to contextualize it (if the field is left empty, the "scrap keywords" will be used).


Currently, the "Keyword(s)" field serves all these 3 purposes. Because of this, it becomes harder to customize the output. These functions need to be separated from each other.

With this segmentation, it becomes, I think, much simpler to integrate the propositions I mentioned in the previous paragraphs, and the UX remains intuitive.


Here's the picture :


1) This is an icon to display an infobox when hovered, that will briefly explain what the keywords inserted in this field are used for.

2) This is an idea I had to improve readability. I don't know if it's really essential but while I'm at it, I might as well put it there!

3) Setting up retractable fields could probably be a good idea.


In the Titles paragraph, I was talking about adding extra customization to the titles by mixing "Title Keywords" and "Longtails Keywords". With this modification of the UX, all that would remain to be added would be a "longtails" field in the Output tab.


Conclusion


That's it for this big post, I hope I have been as clear as possible but I may not have expressed my thoughts well (I'm currently too exhausted to write properly !). If that's the case, don't hesitate to ask me for clarification on what I meant.


Thank you for taking the time to read me, it must have been difficult!


See you soon, and thanks for your work on GSA !

Thanked by 1DrGeek

Comments

  • SvenSven www.GSA-Online.de
    Thanks for the suggestions. It's weekend here now so I will go through this next week. But I can already see some of it that will go into updates.
  • Great :)
    Have a nice week
  • SvenSven www.GSA-Online.de
    title:
    you can do that already by letting it create the articles and changing them afterwards by right click->change title for selected articles->....
    There you can use macros like %keyword% and prefix/suffix with spin syntax to get exactly what you need. I find that a better way than offering more input fields for special cases like this.

    content:
    I really think that adding another min/max word property would cause more issues to people than just changing the present settings to alter there in range output.

    lists:
    next update will improve things here and allow you to define more than one list. I also improved generating of this.

    decoration:
    I have added a new option in next update to add surrounding words as bold too (if no stop words and it looks natural).
    I will think of cursive/underline decoration as well on further updates but for now I think bold is the only use-case here.

    gui changes:
    I see the issue and also think it deserves a change. I will think about a new keyword config where you can define what a listed keyword should be used for (title, filter, scraping, ...).
    Thanked by 1Minidou
  • MinidouMinidou France
    edited October 2020
    Thanks for the updates, these changes are more than welcome !

    How did you feel about Hn tags btw ? You didn't talk about it so far, do you also think something can be done about it, or do you feel like it's not a priority atm ?
    I think it's a big topic, but maybe there are things that need to be changed before thinking about changing the way Hn tags work...

    Title :

    That's a powerful feature, I didn't know it was already there ! Great :)
    Indeed it's better the way it is.

    - While I'm at it, I might as well take this opportunity to report a problem: There's a bug when you select only one article, you have to select at least two for "Change Title for selected Articles" to work.

    - What are the different macros available in the tools ? Or, where to get the info ?

    - On a side note, I had fun changing my titles for testing purposes, but realized that we can't "Undo" the modifications brought to the articles (be it changing the titles or any other changes, actually).
    Is Undo/Redo something you could integrate to the tool ?

    Content :
     
    Yes it might cause issues, I don't know. Actually the only problem I think is the way "Article Length" works, it's a bit confusing to me.

    In my example I was describing an article of 30 to 400 words per paragraph. My problem here is the number of paragraphs.

    But in fact maybe I misunderstood how the tool works.

    In the tool, I enter the values 5-15 for "Paragraphs per Article", and 30-400 for "Words per Article", thinking that these are Min-Max values.

    Maybe I'm wrong to assume this, because I realize that by setting 35-15 for "Paragraphs per Article", my Article Length increases to 1050-6000 words. In other words, what I thought was the minimum value moves, but not the maximum value.

    What I didn't understand here is how could the "minimum" value be higher than the "maximum" value ? There is a logical error, so I guess the field is not of the Min-Max type. How should I interpret this field, how does it work?

    I have a small idea of how this might work, but direct confirmation is better than false assumptions...


    Thanks again for your hard work !
  • Hello Sven,

    I rebound on this post to make a small request

    Is it possible, to have an option, to not to modify the titles of the created articles each time, that I click on the name of the project.

    As, I publish my articles slowly on Wordpress, it is penalizing not to know the unique and exact titles of the articles already published.

    Idea: If I delete the articles already published, it would be good to archive the titles already published to avoid reusing them twice.

    A small bug ?
    If in the Input/keyword(s) there are two times ", it stops the scraping

    Francois

  • SvenSven www.GSA-Online.de
    Hn:
    Will need to go through this again and check, must have over read it.

    >when you select only one article, you have to select at least two for "Change Title for selected Articles" to work.
    Thats a wanted behavior. If it's one article and you want to change things, you can as well do it by entering the new title.

    >- What are the different macros available in the tools ? Or, where to get the info ?
    %keyword% and %title% can be used on that option to use a random keyword or the original title in case you want to add a prefix/suffix.

    >undo feature
    sorry, thats nothing I can provide unless i create backups constantly in background. Thats not something I would want to do. You can however duplicate a project and start changing things there for testing purpose.

    >min max confusion
    The values you enter here are indeed min-max. So the end result of the article will be from min_paragraph*min_words to max_paragraph*max_words ... you should of course make sure that min value is smaller than the max one. The generated article will most likely be in the middle of the max/min words that the label shows.

    You can see which articles have been published by checking the "Published" column in the article listing. I can however add a new function to skip the publishing if it was published before.
    The bug should be fixed in latest update
    Thanked by 1Minidou
  • MinidouMinidou France
    edited October 2020
    Sven said:
    >min max confusion
    The values you enter here are indeed min-max. So the end result of the article will be from min_paragraph*min_words to max_paragraph*max_words ... you should of course make sure that min value is smaller than the max one. The generated article will most likely be in the middle of the max/min words that the label shows.
    Ok thanks, I'm glad I didn't make a mistake in my interpretation !

    However, this brings me back to my initial thought about the values to enter in the tool in order to obtain a result that is both natural and varied.

    I did several tests to confirm my hypotheses about the final output of the articles, and it turns out that to have articles of at least 1500 words, you have to enter large minimum values, either in terms of words or paragraphs.


    To take the example of the 1500 words minimum :
    - For an article of at least 5 paragraphs (a good minimum value in my opinion), you need a minimum of 300 words per paragraph (which is way too much for a minimum value).

    - For an article of at least 50 words per paragraph (my personal minimum value), you would need at least 30 paragraphs (!!!!).


    It is for these different reasons that I had proposed to decorrelate these values in the first place, in favor of an additional field "Words per articles" (for example).

    This field would have made it possible to have articles of at least 1500 articles, but this time with the possibility for the article to have at least 5 paragraphs AND at least 50 words (which for example could have given an article of this style: 65 words | 120 words | 685 words | 55 words | 575 words).

    Anyway, the absence of this feature is not catastrophic!
    If other GSA CG users could give their opinion on this idea, just to see if it would actually make the use of the tool confusing, it would be nice !


    P.S.: I wanted to sort my articles according to their size using the "Size" tab, in order to remove those that were smaller than my requirements, and I noticed that the articles are sorted in a strange order, which is neither according to the number of paragraphs, sentences, words, sources or keyword density .
    In fact, it seems they are not sorted at all ! Or at least not according to their size.

    Could you please fix this problem ? Thank you !
  • SvenSven www.GSA-Online.de
    Sorting: Right click on the listing->Sort->...
    Thanked by 1Minidou
  • FrancoisKFrancoisK Paris
    edited November 2020
    Minidou said:

    Of course, if the values entered conflict with each other, an error message should be displayed to warn the user (for example, if I ask the tool to produce an article of at least 1500 words, while at the same time I ask it to produce only between 1 and 2 paragraphs, between 50 and 400 words...).

    Lists (<ol>, <ul>, <li>)

    Hello @Minidou

    Can I have a little explanation about this new function Add Lists (<ol>, <ul>, <li>) ?
    Thank you

    Merci
    Francois
  • bullet point 
    or 
    list number 
    or
    list names
  • @draculax ,


    Je ne sais pas comment l'utiliser et a quoi ça sert vraiment

    Tu peux être plus explicite ...


  • I think it must take randomly the lists
    either chip or digital.
    or simple list
    Sven will surely confirm or not my interpretation.
    thanks you 
  • SvenSven www.GSA-Online.de
    Sorry, I can't follow your conversation if you switch between English and French.
  • Can I have a little explanation about this new function Add Lists (<ol>, <ul>, <li>) ?
    Thank you
    thanks you sven
  • MinidouMinidou France
    edited November 2020
    There's nothing to explain, <ol>/<ul>/<li> are types of lists in HTML and it's up to you to use them or not in order to optimize your content. It's a good practice in SEO to use them.
    I replied to Francois in PM not to deviate from the subject on this topic and to explain him in French. Thanks.
  • ok thank you 
  • Hello Sven,

    I saw that you added my translation in version 3.66 :)
    It still needs to be improved and structured
    It would be nice to be able to update it, in a collaborative way.

    Thank you for all your efforts and for listening.

    There is still good documentation to be done for the undocumented functions.

    Francois

  • SvenSven www.GSA-Online.de
    I thought it's better than nothing and added it. Let me know if you want to have it removed again.
  • No, it's very nice to share it.
    I have added the last file with added sentences and corrections


    Thanked by 1Sven
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