This is a big topic – if you would like a simple primer then try this article by one of our Tea Time SEO speakers Dave Davies of Beanstalk Internet Marketing. Bill Slawski has also analysed related Google patents to shed light on how Google may be using its understanding of entities in its ranking models.
As it relates to on-page SEO what relevant advice can we give you?
Tip 1 – Reference relevant entities in your content and consider linking to them.
Tip 2 – Mark-up your content to show how you relate to these entities. This goes beyond basic schema markup to create a vocabulary of relevant entities that relate to your content that you can mark-up using linked data publishing mark-up to reference.
There are some great tools like WordLift.io that can do the heavy lifting for you. (Editor’s Note: We’ve just implemented this and will update this guide when we have more results).