Latent Semantic Indexing Concepts

By John Martin

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a new concept that Google began to employ after the recent purchase of a company called Applied Semantics which pioneered the initial technology. LSI was first used by Google in its AdSense program as a way of verifying which adverts would be the most relevant for a particular site; however, now it is being used as a way of rating and ranking websites by Google and other search engines.

What LSI is, in basic and non-mathematical terms, is the ability for the search engine to search for websites on the Internet the same way a human would. In other words, the search engine looks for relevance and quality, rather than just keywords or links. Keywords and links were the way the search engines used to do things but this process had a number of weaknesses. First of all, webmasters or SEO 'experts' that used "blackhat" techniques, could get top rankings by simply loading a site full of irrelevant keywords, using poor quality content, or through the use of link farms. Many sites would simply seek out links from other irrelevant sites only to make money from traffic or AdSense. The old system penalized perfectly good sites--sites with good content, sites that added content too quickly, or sites that were new. Most Internet users have been the victim of many irrelevant sites from search engine top rankings so Google, and other search engines, have decided to do their best to create a cleaner and higher quality Internet experience.

Looking at LSI in more detail, it's easy for us to see how to structure and build our websites and web pages correctly. The LSI algorithm works by scanning your website for keywords and then comparing relationships between the various keywords and keyword phrases which are found. It scans other websites as well that have the same keywords, or concentration of those keywords, and looks for related words and phrases. LSI goes so far as to check grammar, terminologies, and spelling on sites already indexed in addition to your own website. Basically, what LSI is doing is checking the overall theme of your website to see whether it matches what the user is searching for and to see how your site ranks in relation to other similar sites in terms of keyword relevance. The most relevant site will win--it will rank the highest.

For example, if you search for "cellphone" on a search engine under the old system it would display sites which have the highest mention of "cellphone" and/or the most links. But under LSI, a search for "cellphone" displays results of sites that also have the word "mobile phone" or "cellular phone" or other relevant phrases. What this means is that keyword stuffing into sites and articles will not win you a higher ranking, but that relevant quality content and a good overall theme will.

Website developers and writers who have been using website optimization techniques based on ethical and quality principles will finally come out on top. At the same time, irrelevant and rubbish sites are thrown off the rankings completely. The higher the quality and relevance of the site, the better the rankings will be with the introduction of latent semantic indexing.

John Martin has been working with website optimization techniques since the early 1990's. He is the owner of http://www.LatentSemanticIndexing.com where you can read articles related to LSI and keep up-to-date on the latest optimization techniques.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Martin

Latent Semantic Indexing Changes Search Engine Optimization

By Nick Yorchak

The search engine optimization (SEO) industry continues to grow everyday. In just the past three years, SEO spending has increased in the neighborhood of 400%, and this trend is forecasted to increase even more in the near future. This year alone, over $1 trillion will be allocated to online marketing efforts.

Yet while search engine optimizers (SEO's) have continued to use many of the same methods to increase the visibility and positioning of their clients' websites in search results, the search engines themselves have continued their evolution. Now SEO's must do the same in order to keep up with the constantly evolving search engine algorithms of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and a number of others.

Within the past year, many companies have no doubt noticed large relevancy fluctuations in the search engine rankings. While most SEO's keep scratching their heads and wondering what happened, others research and test to identify the cause of these changes. Then they use these findings to alter their online optimization strategies. But just how have these algorithms evolved? More importantly, what can we as SEO's do to retain top positioning?

One reason for this shuffling of results has been attributed to the inclusion of latent semantic indexing (LSI) technology into the search engine algorithms. Google, in fact, implemented LSI into its algorithm a few years ago and has continued to use it since.

But what is LSI and how does it affect page rank? LSI is a system that allows search engines to identify what a page is about beyond matching the specific search query text. In other words, LSI looks for word relationships within page content, just like a human being would do. It determines the keywords of a page and then looks for related words that are semantically close. Therefore, LSI grants related words within page content a higher importance and value, while lowering the value of pages that only contain specific keywords and lack related terms.

Yet while LSI technologies don't understand the meaning of any of these words, the phrase relationships they identify between words are a major determinant of search engine positioning. For example, a page about McDonald's will naturally contain terms such as "hamburgers" or "Happy Meals." For this reason, pages that target a range of related keywords within the page content often have higher and more stable rankings for their primary keywords.

But how do we know what words or phrases Google would consider to be related? The best way to discover these semantic relationships is to perform a search of Google with the tilde (~) character in front of your query. For example, type "~hamburgers" into the search box and Google will return pages with bolded related terms. A search for "~hamburgers" returned the related terms "fast food," "ground beef," "burger," and even "fast food restaurant." Thus, Google expects to see related words like these within the contextual content of a page targeting the term "hamburger."

As you can see, when performing search engine optimization, it is advantageous to error on the side of too much information than not enough due to the fact that LSI expects to see related words and phrases.
This is especially true because Google uses LSI to evaluate the relevancy of your website's link profile. This means that Google identifies how relevant each of your external and internal links are to your keywords and website as a whole. This fact is another great reason to mix the anchor text of your links. If all your links are based around a particular phrase and never mention any related or similar phrases, your site's ranking will suffer thanks to Google's LSI algorithm.

As search engine algorithms continue to evolve and come ever closer to mimicking human behavior in order to return the most relevant results, we as SEO's must do our best to present page content in a way that is most useful to users. The power of latent semantic indexing to identify relationships between words, within content, and even between pages is changing the way search engines determine relevancy results and position. As SEO's, we must utilize the power of latent semantic indexing to diversify our pages or we'll be forced to watch them slowly fade away.

Nick Yorchak is an SEO expert and Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Fusionbox, a full-service Denver Internet marketing, web design, and search engine optimization (SEO) company He can be reached at: nyorchak@fusionbox.com or at (720)956-1083.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nick_Yorchak

Get High Search Engine Ranking And Lots Of Visitors With Two Simple Strategies

By Robert Seviour

To get visitors to come to your website from the results of a search engine, your listing needs to be close to the top of the first page of results. But since many search terms produce hundreds of thousands of results, sometimes millions, how can you outsmart all the others who are trying for the same thing as you?

The answer is that in minor niches the web pages holding the top positions often have have not had high quality search engine optimization and other promotion techniques applied to them. They are there only because the other pages have received even less treatment to achieve good positioning.

You can get some idea of your chances of getting to the top by seeing what Google page rank the leading sites have. The way to find out the PR is by loading the Google page rank tool bar which you can find with an internet search using those keywords. It’s a free download. When you have it, you will see a small green bar which extents to the right if a web page has a PR greater than zero. When you hover your mouse cursor above the PR box, numbers appear showing the rating out of a maximum of ten.

Basic, amateur web pages will have no score and the heavy hitters like Google itself and a few other sites which get massive traffic, such as youtube.com and statcounter.com have PRs of ten. For most busy commercial sites five is a good score. If a small business get a score as high as this they are definitely doing something right.

Now you have some idea of the values that are to be found, check out the PRs of sites at the top of search results for the keywords that you are focusing on. If you find that the top site, for example, has a rating of four and the ones below it have two or perhaps even zero, then it won’t be very difficult for you to get a high position for your page, if you do the right things.

Although Google keeps its algorithm secret – that’s the process or formula which they use to score a webpage – some factors are known. You can read what Google has to say on the subject in the Google Webmaster Tools help files – just put in those words as your search clue to find this. Google’s main objective is to give users search results which are useful to them. The word that they use over and over to describe this is relevant. It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come in search engine quality. I’ve just been using a primitve search engine on a site which sells books. It was instructive to see just how hopeless their search engine is. For the terms I searched on, hundreds of results were produced yet I could not find what I wanted.

You must make your pages content-rich, full of on-topic material. But by experiment and observation I have discovered that it is not necessary to have very long pages.
The other very important factor is to have inbound links from other web pages with good page ranks. There are several ways to obtain these; your pages may have such interesting and useful content that people make links from their site to yours. It’s nice to get such links, but you have no control over whether you will, nor the timescale. It’s most unlikely to happen quickly.

You can offer link exchanges to the webmasters or owners of other sites. If each site offers something interesting for visitors coming from the other one, you may get agreement to this.
The method which offers the greatest degree of certainty – and is free, is to write articles on relevant themes and submit them to article directories. These pieces can contain hyperlinks to your website. Because the main article directories have high page rank, the links you have embedded have a strong leveraging effect and will raise your web page’s page rank.

One problem is that Google does not react very fast to efforts in this area and you may not see the results for some weeks or months. But you can multiply the effectiveness of the article submission strategy by uploadng to multiple directories. Search on article directory to find them. Check their PR before you submit – you always want a link from locations with higher PR.

Some effort across the two areas of relevance and acquiring high-quality inbound links will pull your page rank up, and with it your positioning within the search results.
If you submit lots of articles, varying the keywords you focus on within your subject area, you can keep adding to the sources which send traffic to your website. It’s only a matter of persisting, it costs nothing and is worth the effort because the first two or three results listed get many times more clicks than the ones lower down.

For inspiration, go to a major article directory and look at the number of contributions by the top authors. You are in for a surprise, the figures are enormous, hundreds, even thousands of pieces. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t have bothered, so get started.

Download a Free Sales Masterclass
Information on the Selling for Engineers manual and Seminar
Robert Seviour is a sales trainer specialising in business development for technical companies.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_Seviour

Latent Symantec Indexing (LSI) - The Key To High Search Rankings

By Monica Hendrix

There are billions of pages online today and the web is growing at such a fast rate that many sites simply can’t get ahead of established websites – but now they can.

Imagine building a site to a formula that search engines are looking for and will rank highly and think what that will do to your bottom line profits.

Well you can if you build your site in the specific way outlined below.
Capturing Top Search Engine Rankings
Websites that are built on the principles of Latent Symantec Analysis (LSA) commonly known as Latent Symantec Indexing (LSI) are a great way of catching top search engine rankings
These sites are themed specifically to their chosen subject and contain all the keywords that are ever likely to be entered into search engines, when people are looking for a site with your chosen subject.

LSI Sites are Now Affordable
LSA / LSI sites are not yet popular and they’ve been known by only a few people.
Semantec websites and the principles to build them have only become known to the majority of search engine optimization companies recently and they’ve now affordable to the smaller businesses.

LSA / LSI websites are constructed with the aim of taking away the top rankings of ordinary web sites. These new sites are perfect for removing and getting above "ordinary" for a very wide range of search phrases.

In conclusion an LSA / LSI site is aimed at getting rankings for anything and everything that relates to the site promoted.

The site gives the search engine exactly what they want to give it a high placing – an expert site, that’s perfectly constructed using "themes" that are inter related.

An LSI site is constructed in the following way:
1. There is a top level keyword phrase that becomes apparent after the keyword research is completed and this keyword phrase is used in the site's domain name.
2. There are subordinate primary keywords that fall under the top level keyword - and these are used for the theming of the site.
3. subordinate to the primary keywords are the third level keyword phrases - these phrases are used to build clusters of 5 or more pages and they sit below one of the primary keyword phrases in the site's structure.

These are the phrases that actually get ranked first and also bring in the most website traffic overall. So if the site has 5 primary keyword themes, and there are 5 3rd. level pages per theme then you have a 31 page website - home page, 5 primary pages, 25 third level pages.

The actual keyword phrases are not known until information has been retrieved from Google's search engine and thousands of phrases are used to build up a Semantic keyword set.
The phrases are normally found by search popularity, number of competing websites, number of ad-word advertisers, examination of the 10 top ranking websites on Google for the market sector - the phrases are then filtered and sorted semantically and then the site is built.
LSI sites in conclusion ,are a great way to take on and beat your competition.

Now the principles are widely known and they have become more affordable, they will become a great new way for sites to capture better search engine rankings and profits.

MORE FREE SEO INFO FOR WEB GREATER TRAFFIC
On all aspects of making your online business more profitable and more about LSI websites visit our website for more effective online marketing strategies at http://www.internet-viral-marketing.com/index.html
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Monica_Hendrix

Does Your Website Content Stink?

Website content can make or break a website...
Without good content, a website will not rank well on any search engine and therefore, not be successful (at least in organic searches).
Your website content is the first chance you have to communicate with visitors to your website, so you had better make it good. If you can't write to save your life, then hire a ghostwriter at Elance.com who can.

Just be sure that you hire someone who is qualified for the job. Often people try to save a few bucks and choose a writer who lives overseas. The last thing you want to do is put someone in charge of content creation for your website if they are not fluent in English.
While you probably already know that your content needs to be informative and interesting, there are many things that you may not have thought of that can set you apart from all your competitors.

First of all, avoid bright colors and flashing animations on your web pages or you will most likely annoy people. This is certainly not a good idea, as they will probably click the back button and never return.
Remember, your goal is to keep them on your website for as long as possible. When they leave it should be via a link on your website that is going to make you a sale or affiliate commission.
This is why your layout is very important. Don't go overboard here...

By sticking with simple, wide columns and a side menu, you can make it easy for anyone to find their way around your web page. However, put too many columns in your page, and you can just as easily confuse a reader.
A good way to find the right design for your website is to look at the website content of your competitors...

Since some of your potential customers are probably already going there, you can see what kinds of things are working for the more successful websites. While you don’t want to directly copy your rivals, you can certainly get some really good ideas.
Also, clear links that guide a surfer from one point to another is the best way to make sure that you’re not angering anyone that made it to your website in the first place.
You most likely worked very hard to get this traffic, so do your best to provide a good experience when people visit your website.

Something you must not forget is that you actually have to satisfy the needs of real people and search engine spiders. If you focus on one, but not the other, your website will not reach its full income earning potential.
Even if your content is up to snuff, you will be less likely to dominate top 10 listings if you have no idea what your theme keyword density, search engine proven synonym density and primary keyword prominence is.

Google and other search engines now factor all of this in when determining how to rank websites...
There is obviously no way to manually figure this out. So, without the right software, you will have a very hard time getting the results you desire.
In summary, all search engines love websites with quality content that's relevant to the keywords and theme of the website. If you structure your content in tightly focused groups of web pages, you will gain a big advantage over 99% of websites online.

The easiest way to build a perfectly-structured, highly-optimized site is to use a great new software tool that just came out called SiloMatic.
This software guarantees all of your website content is properly structured to rank high on Google and other major search engines. It also calculates your all important content densities and alerts you if something is not correct.
You can read all about it right here: SiloMatic Website

What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

By Francisco Lakay

Through latent semantic indexing (LSI) Google scans the overall theme of a website for fresh, relevant and good content, even if they do happen to pop up over night. This will increase your site's Google ranking and might even enable you to break into the top 10 rankings. LSI will inevitably give a searcher the best possible site for his preferences, based on keywords and comprehensive topic coverage, and not just incoming links. Therefore, more emphasis is placed on quality and freshness of content, which will help sites gain higher ranking positions.

Previously Google would place 80 percent of its emphasis on incoming links and 20 percent on the actual site itself. All this is about to change with the introduction of LSI as deciding factor. Of course incoming links will always be relevant, but they may not carry the same weight as before. This will definitely help all of those who work on their sites with more emphasis on quality and content, as opposed to more incoming links.

What all of this means: web publishers who have done and continue to do their jobs correctly will have a better chance of ranking high with latent semantic indexing. Those who concentrate on keyword stuffing, creating nonsensical content and spending a lot of time using link farms will inevitably not.

Do you want to have a website?
1) With quality content and relevant niche-related information?
2) With a perfectly-structured, highly-optimized web pages?
3) That will give you every opportunity to increase your Google rankings?
4) Using the latest SEO software tool?

Get all the information you need at SiloMatic and give your website the boost it needs to rank high in Google and other major search engines.

© Francisco M. Lakay. 2007. Find out how to boost your site rankings. SiloMatic - Dominate Top 10 Google Rankings gives you information on how to design perfectly-structured, highly-optimized web pages.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Francisco_Lakay

SiloMatic, Silo Pages and Google

You may be wondering, "What in the world is SiloMatic?"
Well, SiloMatic is a brand new desktop software application for creating search-engine friendly
websites quickly and easily.

The best content to use for SiloMatic is original articles. You can create 400 - 600 word articles
yourself or outsource this job to a ghostwriter by using a service like Elance.com.
Now, as you probably know, Google and other search engines try to display the most relevant search results for a given search term by ranking websites that have a tight theme relevance across the entire site.
However, do you know that synonyms of the main keyword for a web page strengthen the theme relevance of the page?
That's right... and this is very important.

Additionally, linking pages in a specific way to prevent theme bleeding, while keeping a tight focus between pages that are linked together, strengthens the theme relevance even further.

If you think this sounds complicated, imagine trying to figure out how to do all this manually...
Talk about a complete waste of time, if you could even do it at all by yourself.
Well, thanks to SiloMatic, you don't have to!

SiloMatic creates a website that links all the pages correctly to prevent theme bleeding. It also makes sure you create tightly focused groups of web pages known as silos.
Simply put... A silo is a group of web pages with content that strengthens (rather than hurts) your theme relevance.
These silos are linked together in a linear way to reinforce the theme.

The bottomline...
Better rankings on Google and other search engines, more visitors to your website and of course... increased profits.
So, download your copy of SiloMatic today and discover how it can benefit you and your web business:

SiloMatic Download Link