OntoSearch

So you’ve optimized your web content for your niche keyword terms, made sure you use those terms in the meta title, the meta keywords, meta description, H tags, top of the page, bottom of the page, and scattered throughout the Web page. You’ve spent weeks obtaining links with your keywords in the anchor text. You’ve blogged and pinged, tagged and pinged, posted to forums, and prayed, “Please Google, list my site as #1 for my main keywords!”

And then somebody just had to mention the new Google patent and latent semantic indexing (LSI) and how it will affect your search engine optimization (SEO).

Latent what?

Like quite a few, you’re probably just starting to hear about LSI. So what the heck is it?

Latent semantic indexing, or LSI, is a way for Google to figure out regardless of whether a web page is really about the keywords you’ve stuffed into it.

If you’re in to black hat SEO, this is almost certainly making you nervous. It employed to be that you could rank pretty well with just on-page search engine optimization. Sprinkle the correct keywords in the appropriate places in your Web content and Bam! You’re at the top of the search engine outcomes.

Then it began to get more tough. You had to get quite a few other web sites to link to you with your keywords in the anchor text (the link text). And if the internet sites or pages linking to your web site had been on the exact same theme, that was best too.

But then the spam web sites took over — millions of junk blogs (splogs) stuffed full of scraped keyword-rich Web content that frequently wasn’t even really readable for humans. It got so that the top search engine outcomes for any keyword had been often these junk web sites. Imagine if you had been Google. Wouldn’t you begin to worry whether individuals would stop making use of your search engine if you couldn’t deliver the Web content they were genuinely searching for?

The new Google patent indicates that Google is now making use of (or intends to use) new algorithms to try to weed out the black hat SEO spam sites. Latent semantic indexing is one way of performing that. For any given topic, you can calculate what other words and even ideas you would expect to see in the content on the web page and even on the web web site. You can even calculate how usually they should appear, what phrases ought to appear, etc.

If a keyword appears quite a few times on a page, but an LSI analysis indicates the page does not actually seem to naturally be about that topic, it is not going to rank high in Google’s search engine outcomes any a lot more. And if the keyword-rich links leading to a page indicate that the Web content should be about some thing other than what LSI indicates it is in fact about, it is not going to rank high in Google’s outcomes either.

So what can you do in an age when it’s hard to fool your way to the top of Google’s listings for your keywords?

This may sound overly simplistic, but maybe you need to actually just write normal Web content about the topic! After all, that’s actually what Google wants to see and it’s genuinely what the individuals who surf to your Web site want to see. Maybe you must give it to them, if you’re not already. Instead of trying to trick Google, provide excellent Web content that is naturally written about the topic. With out even attempting, the words that Google would expect to be on the page with your keywords will just naturally be there. After all, they are comparing your page to their analysis of other real content on the topic.

When the Web first came into being, men and women wrote about whatever they wanted to write about, and folks looking for that topic discovered those sites. But then folks started playing tricks, practically ruining the search engines. Now things have gone full circle. The pages that are really most about a given topic will begin to be the ones that show up at the top of the search engine outcomes. Search engine users will be happy, Google will be happy, and you just may well find it’s less complicated and faster to produce natural Web content than to spend all of your time trying to trick Google.