Read Charles Heflin’s ‘SEO 20/20 Blog’ latest post titled “99% of Websites are Misunderstood… Is Yours One of Them?”.


Charles Heflin’s latest blog post is reprinted here.

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If your site is not in the top 10, 20 or even 100 spots for your target keywords in the search engines then your website is not recognized as being 100% relevant.

In the search engines’ plight to combat spam and useless content, they have adopted new technology that is sending once, home run websites, plummeting down a bottomless pit to be buried in a pile of unrecognized fodder.

Now, more than ever, the search engines are using a technology called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to determine a website’s relevance.

LSI is a complex algorithm that not only checks keywords on your page but also checks for other words that commonly appear within content related to those keywords.

LSI is an algorithm that is so important that Google acquired a company by the name of Applied Semantics, a proven innovator in semantic text processing, in early 2003.

Here is a quote straight from Google:

Applied Semantics’ products are based on its patented CIRCA technology, which understands, organizes, and extracts knowledge from websites and information repositories in a way that mimics human thought and enables more effective information retrieval. A key application of the CIRCA technology is Applied Semantics’ AdSense product that enables web publishers to understand the key themes on web pages to deliver highly relevant and targeted advertisements.(read the news release here)

Google has been using this technology for AdSense in an effort to display targeted advertisements on websites for quite some time. Undeniable evidence now supports the fact that Google is now using the same technology to determine the relevance of web pages in their index.

It is a fact that LSI is also in use by other search engines as well. Here is what Mike Grehan of Search Engine Watch has to say about LSI:

“Latent Semantic Indexing is often misunderstood in its true purpose. (It is based on the vector space model of document classification.) Fundamentally, it operates at some level in a ranking algorithm to help alleviate issues with ranking pages purely by text pattern matching, by adding context.

Using statistical analysis, LSI can discover that documents have words which are often used in the same context. For example, “apple” and “computer” will also have “Mac OS” and are therefore also relevant. The same thing applies with “windows” as an operating system as opposed to an invention for looking through walls. It’s all about trying to understand more about the nature and intent of the user query and returning information in context with the user’s search, even when they give little clue as to the actual nature of the search. Incidentally, LSI is used by other search engines besides Google.”

If you used to enjoy top 10 placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and suddenly saw an unexplainable drop in your rankings then you know approximately when this algorithm began its crawl.

If you have never enjoyed top 10 rankings or are struggling to regain your rankings then then you need to understand the following:

You will not gain or maintain high rankings unless the search engines understand the theme of your website as determined by the LSI algorithm and other important on and off page factors.

It is a proven fact that most search engine users do not go beyond the top 20 results on a search query. It is also a fact that 99% of the websites on the Internet are unaware of the impact that LSI is playing. They are either unaware because the don’t know about it, deny it, or are too lazy to do anything about it.

Read the rest of this article here: The Master Plan

Best Regards,

Charles Heflin

The author Charles Heflin is dedicated to educating aspiring webmasters to create solid online businesses through proven and cutting edge strategies. For more information visit:
SEO Tutorials (with videos)
SEO Blog

*IMNewswatch would like to thank Charles Heflin for granting exclusive rights to reprint this latest blog post.

 

 

 

 

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