You may have noticed lately a new trend in search engine technology. Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI, has become one of the new favorite ways to rank websites within search results. Following suit, SEOs are adapting techniques and creating new strategies to rank well using the new technology. To gain a coveted top 10 ranking you will now need to focus on keyword density or theme density. In the good old days you could simply stuff your content with keywords (keyword stuffing) and it would not take long before you were on the front page of SERPS. I have already shown why LSI came about and how it thwarts keyword stuffers. What all of this means is that you now need to understand how to use your unique content correctly incorporating themes for the best possible results.

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.

With LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) being the latest tool in the belt to thwart spammers, LSI has not only changed the way content is looked at but incoming links as well. While having incoming links is important, their effect is now lessened as not just any link will help your rankings anymore. The idea is to build a theme of links to all of your pages, or deep link them.

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.

As always, the information and questions you find on forums can be highly inaccurate and misleading. When it comes to Google’s ranking algorithm there are a few known tidbits and a huge amount of speculation and rumors that although sometimes true can be highly misleading.

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.

I was playing with Google’s “2001 Web” search engine and found a few interesting keywords to type in. Many things that are exploding on the web right now where not even heard of seven years ago and some of them, like YouTube turns up nothing. YouTube has become a part of our culture and it turns up zero search results in 2001.

Social Media Marketing – 0 results. Had not even been coined yet.

Shoemoney – 4 results (although non of them are relevant or working)

YouTube – 0 results in 2001, now has over 1 billion.

Web 2.0 – The birth of web 2.01 in 2001, only 2,470 results compared to over 99 million today.

Ajax – No results for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Now has over 118 million.

Barack Obama – Only 772 results in 2001, now has over 77 million.

iPod – 1,300 results, Apple is not even on the first page. Now has 419 million results.

problogger – 0 results in 2001. Now has over 1.2 million.

gas prices – 145,000 results in 2001, now over 33.6 million.

Another weird thing to do is type in other keywords to see what was big news back then. For instance, I typed in iTunes and saw a headline that iTunes had just topped 275,000 downloads. They probably do that on a daily basis now. Bill Gates even had his own website back in 01′ (first result).

After putting up my list of dofollow blogs I got a lot of questions about the whole “dofollow” thing as there is no such thing as a “dofollow” attribute. If I need to explain this to you, end your career in Internet marketing now (trust me I’m saving you a lot of time!) Anyways I called them dofollow because pretty much every blog now uses the (rel=”nofollow”) attribute on all hyperlinks posted in comments. I simply called them dofollow in the sense that there is not a “nofollow” attribute attached to the links in those blogs.

The nofollow attribute was designed by Google in 2005 to more or less remove a large amount of spam from Google’s indexing process. Links that have the (rel=”nofollow”) are not indexed by Google’s spiders and doesn’t have any influence on the target link’s PageRank. After Google made the move, everyone else followed in line and now respect this attribute. However, not all engines interpret the attribute in the same way:

This spam control method is now used almost everywhere. WordPress implemented it in v1.5 to automatically attribute all comment data URLs with nofollow. Large media sites like Digg, Furll, and YouTube have also implemented the attribute to control spam. One of the biggest deterrent for some spammers is not being able to draw link juice from a page… No juice means no ranking for the terms they are spamming therefor why bother on that blog? However, if you are just looking for traffic the nofollow tag does not matter.

In my last post about making money with Facebook I gave you guys some info about cloaking your affiliate URLs and how important it is to keeping your ads live. If Facebook notices a direct affiliate link your chances of getting your ad approved are slim to none.

I just read a post by Shoemoney about Google drastically decreasing people’s AdWords quality score for direct linking their affiliate URLs. There are hundreds of places that you can cloak affiliate URLs with short, better looking, unsuspecting links. What this all comes down to is being smart with where you are sending your traffic (if you want your CPC to remain low…) This is kind of good timing because the next Facebook money maker will be all about landing pages and how they can increase your conversions. Aside from that I am also trying to get some feedback on what people need help with when it comes to making money with Facebook so feel free to comment and ill work it in to the next post.

I would also like to hear from people on whether or not they are having any success on Facebook as I have put some decent information into these posts and anyone who reads them could easily be making some cash money.