Sounds great… But how do I masterfully theme all of my unique content? Simply put, it’s done by strategically placing expert verbiage and theme related words into your content. It’s really quite simple. People are so used to doing shady things to make their content rank and now that search engines have a more natural LSI technology; ranking will become a more natural process. The expert verbiage (synonyms) are search engine proven synonyms known as “SEPS.” Consider these SEPS your new best friends. So how do I find good SEPS to use for my content?

How To Find Good SEPS:

It’s really easy and Google actually does most of the work for you. Simply enter a tilde “~” in front of your keyword within the Google search box and the synonyms will be automatically highlighted in bold within the search result pages.

Ex: http://www.google.com/#q=~car+parts Notice how different synonyms are bold within these search results. These search engine proven synonyms are what you want to work into your content. So if you are making a niche site for example, these SEPS will give you the basics of what search engines are looking for and what they place value on. These SEPS are also a great way to develop themes, sub-themes, and topics for your site.

Another great tool for finding awesome SEPS is the adCenter Keyword Group Detection Tool. Simply enter your keyword or keyphrase and it will spit out all kinds of goodies to get you started.

I’ll say this again also, there is nothing new about these techniques. Theme density, interlinking your pages, and using SEPS has been around for a while. Until LSI came into the lime light these were just well kept secrets amongst the elite who know that when used properly, can easily put a site in the top10 of any engines SERPS.

For example, deep linking to many pages within a website using anchor text that relates to the “theme” of the page is much more crucial than having a bunch of links back to your homepage. Anchor text keywords must also be thematically altered for inbound links to any one page. If this sounds confusing let me try and clear this shit up. Lets say the page you are linking to is about the “flu.” Right off the bat, LSI would determine if the phrase “naturally” occurs within the domain name [ie. www.fluhelp.com]. Next, LSI would look for some variations of related key phrases that could/should be used within the anchor text of the links:

“stomach flu”
“flu symptoms”
“bird flu”
“common cold”
“flu treatments”
“flu vaccine”
etc…

This is not a new practice by any means. Any real, decent SEO has probably been using themed strategies to achieve top rankings for years as the natural theming builds much stronger rankings and content. Most people who are new to the game think these new techniques have derived from the introduction of LSI technology when in fact “themed websites” have just been a closely guarded secret.

In the beginning search engine spiders would look only for the presence and frequency of keywords on a web page to determine that pages relevancy. As search began to grow it became clear that this type of approach would yield poor search results. A good example is the engine could match “car” and “automobile” but fail to recognize homonym (words with multiple meanings) such as “mouse” and “keyboard.” Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a new approach at understanding not only keywords, but the context in which they are used on the entire web page.

Using statistical analysis (LSI) can look at pages that have words which are often used in the same context. Lets say “apple” and “computer” are keywords, “Mac OS” is also there and are therefore also relevant. Another way to look at this is determining whether a page is about “windows” the operating system, or an invention to throw things out of your car. LSI technology is about looking more into the context of indexed content, and allowing a more natural method of search to happen. Consequently, the technology is not only used by Google but other search engines as well.

An excerpt from Google’s LSI Patent that gives the basic key requirements of their LSI technology:
“The system is further adapted to identify phrases that are
related to each other, based on a phrase’s ability to predict
the presence of other phrases in a document. More specifically,
a prediction measure is used that relates the actual co-occurrence
rate of two phrases to an expected co-occurrence rate
of the two phrases. Information gain, as the ratio of actual
co-occurrence rate to expected co-occurrence rate, is one such
prediction measure. Two phrases are related where the prediction
measure exceeds a predetermined threshold. In that case, the
second phrase has significant information gain with respect to
the first phrase. Semantically, related phrases will be those
that are commonly used to discuss or describe a given topic or
concept, such as “President of the United States” and “White
House.” For a given phrase, the related phrases can be ordered
according to their relevance or significance based on their
respective prediction measures.”

From a webmasters perspective there’s not much to worry about. If you are creating quality content with a theme, your rankings will most likely just improve. Those at risk as always are those looking to game the indexing system with keyword stuffing, or over working their keyword density until the page is no longer natural context. Randomly inserting keywords into an article / website will no longer get you those top rankings. In fact, over optimizing and duplicate content could not only hurt your rankings but be the death of them.  This this big change in search, its likely to have an effect on the way people create content. Again, the idea is to theme your content (more coming soon.)

That should give you the overview of what exactly LSI technology is. The general idea as always from the search engine’s end is a new way to bring natural search to the table, cut down on spam,  and those who are faking their way to the top. If you want more information on LSI I recommend reading through that patent up above. There’s a crap load of information in it.