Google's New Technique For Ranking Pages - Latent Semantic Indexing and Analysis


by Colin McNulty - Date: 2007-02-14 - Word Count: 402 Share This!

Latent Semantic Indexing means that a search engine tries to associate certain terms with concepts when indexing web pages. For example, Tiger and Woods are associated with golf, Paris and Hilton are associated with a woman instead of a city and a hotel.

If you search for a keyword on Google and add a tilde ~ before the search term, then you get an idea of what Google thinks about a search term. For example, if you do a semantic search for phone, Google returns Nokia as the first result. A normal search for phone returns different results. Adding a tilde to the search term seems to instruct Google to do a semantic search.

Google has been using this concept to determine suitable ads for its AdSense service for some time now. It seems that Google is now also using this concept to improve the quality of its search results.

Why is this important to your website promotion and search engine optimisation activities?

As appears likely, if Google uses this concept in its ranking algorithm then you should not focus on a single keyword, but on a set of related keywords with your search engine optimization activities. You should optimize some of the pages on your web site for keywords that are synonymous with the keyword you're targeting.

Latent semantic indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.

So what should you be doing now that you were not doing before? Simply: nothing. Your pages should be content rich and about the intended subject. Written naturally and for the intention of being useful, a web page will naturally rank well even in Latent Semantic Indexing world. Of course, if you've been naughty, and been keyword stuffing your pages.... you might be in trouble. That's not to say that you should pay no attention to the keyword density or keyword frequency in your pages, if fact you should be paying even more attention, and this is where an experienced search engine optimiser starts to show their quality.


Related Tags: marketing, google, search, engine, optimization, semantic, ranking, indexing, analysis, firm, latent

To talk to one of our Google certified Online Marketing Consultants who is an expert in Latent Semantic Indexing and Analysis, visit us at http://www.intrinsic-marketing.co.uk

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