SEO And LSI
If you’ve been reading any of the SEO sites lately you will have seen the buzz about Google using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to analyze the topic of a page and it’s relevancy to a specific search term. Obviously this is only one of many factors that Google (and other search engines) is considering when they rank a page, but I think it’s an important factor and one we must consider.
Latent Semantic Indexing uses groupings of words to a term, rather than a one-to-one relationship. Google, if the gossip is to be believed, is apparently no longer as concerned with keyword density, but with the relationship of information on your page and of the pages linking to you. The Latent Semantic algorithm, of course, has no idea what the words mean or how they are related, but it identifies patterns in an uncannily human way.
This Latent Semantic Analysis technique means that pages that have many words in common are considered to be related and correspondingly, pages with no, or few words, in common are unrelated. The consequence of this is that, most likely, links from non-related pages are ignored or greatly reduced in importance. This ties in very well with the fact that link schemes and unrelated links have no effect on search engine placement. Links from related “trusted” sites are the only ones to have any real effect.
How do we use this in practice?
For instance, if your website is about stamp collecting, mention the phrase “stamp collecting” as well as related keywords such as penny black, postal history, stamp catalogs and stamp album. Don’t make the mistake of just repeating “stamp collecting” over and over.
So, what does this mean for bloggers and webmasters?
Firstly, it’s one more reason to not worry about trying to trick the search engines in an attempt to gain higher rankings from on-page keywords. Write your posts or pages naturally and focus on providing quality information for your audience and your pages will be automatically relevant.
Unrelated link exchanges are a waste of time, don’t bother with link farms and those exchanges where your link appears at the bottom of some unrelated page. Avoid linking to unrelated sites as well since linking to dodgy neighborhoods will undoubtedly lower your search engine rankings. Relevant links do have value, so go ahead and exchange links with related sites on related pages. Here at Sussex SEO we focus only on on-topic sites and our successes show this to be an effective strategy.
How do you know if a link is worthwhile? Follow my plan. I never exchange links just for the sake of a link. I forget all about search engines and link popularity. If you think it will bring targeted visitors to your blog, then do it, otherwise pass. I know this goes against conventional wisdom which tells us that there’s no such thing as a bad link. Maybe there isn’t, but there are plenty of links that are completely worthless.
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Tags: SEO