An Introduction to Latent Semantic Indexing (day 3)

The doorway to a new generation of search engine optimization has opened and the door to the old methods of gaining high rankings in the search engines is quickly closing.

It is vital to understand why this has happened and why you need to take the time to educate yourself about it.

I really don't mean to scare you at all. My intent is to educate you about where the search engines are headed and really how easy it is to take advantage of their "new stand".

Here comes the fear factor...

If you don't take the time to learn about this then gaining rankings in the search engines will be like trying to combat an entire army with your bare fists!

Again, I don't say this to scare you, it really is quite easy to take advantage of the latest swing in search engine technology called Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI for short.

What is LSI?

To put it simply, LSI is able to determine the relevance of a website by quickly comparing its content to that of existing websites that have high trust.

If the new site does not contain the expert verbiage that is commonly associated with the subject matter then the new website will not be found within the first 1000 results.

LSI is an algorithm that closely resembles the thought processes that an actual "human" would go through in order to determine if the results of their query are relevant to what they were searching for.

In other words the search engines are the closest they have ever been to being able to quickly determine relevance based on what an actual human would find relevant by comparing the structure and "words" of a page and website and then comparing them to those of websites that are already considered relevant.

For example...

Let's say you are doing a web page about golf. Under the old way of SEO you would look at your competition to find out how many times they use the word "golf" on their page in order to "optimize" your page to rank for the word golf.

Under the new generation of SEO you would totally ignore keyword density analysis and focus on "expert quality content" and "theme giving" website design and menu structure.

Under the new generation of SEO "keyword density analysis" (the number of times a specific keyword appears on a web page) is old and no longer works!

The search engines used to look at the number of times the word "golf" appeared on a webpage in order to deem it relevant to golf and "rank" the page for golf.

They don't do this anymore!

In order to rank for the keyword "golf" you have to get terms that are "semantic" (mean the same thing as) with the word "golf".

Now search engines are funny beasts and they don't use a thesaurus to determine semantically related words. They use human trends.

To illustrate this let's take a little peek behind the veil of mystery:

1. Do a "semantic" search on Google using the "~" (tilde) function by typing ~golf

~golf (click to open search in new window)

Look for the keywords that are in BOLD

At the time of this writing I get:

• sports
• golf
• country
• golf's
• golfer's
• club
• golfer

Most people don't know about the Google "~" function to find "search engine determined" synonyms.

The key word here is "search engine determined" not thesaurus determined.

Look at the top site for the keyword "golf" and you will see that they don't simply sprinkle the word "golf" all over their home page.

What you will find is "expert verbiage". These are word other than the word "golf" yet are related to golf.

Keyword density is dead and "relevance density" is in!

They cover all aspects of golf and the LSI algorithm has determined that because they completely cover the theme of golf, not only on their home page, but throughout their entire site that they deserve the #1 spot!

check out golf.com to take a peek at the content of their pages and the design of their site.

LSI not only looks for keywords on a single page, it looks for other keywords that are related throughout your ENTIRE SITE!

In upcoming lessons I will be sharing videos to show you how incredibly easy it is to take advantage of LSI for the purpose of high rankings in the search engines.

Don't get scared by this prospect. There is an exact and logical method to all of this madness. It is the secret that the top SEO firms on the planet have guarded closely as a "trade secret".

The cat is out of the bag... In the next lesson we will begin to dive into the evidence and the strategy that will literally allow you to out rank 99% of the websites on the Internet, regardless of competition.

This is new stuff and is not being taught anywhere else. You can learn more about LSI by doing a search on Google but nobody is spilling the beans on how to design content and websites to gain high rankings using LSI.

Until next time,

Charles Heflin
Professional SEO Advisor / Consultant
SEO 20/20