Importance of Keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing to Get Better Ranking For Your Website

Importance of Keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing to Get Better Ranking For Your Website

To appreciate fully the impact that your choice of keywords and keyword phrases has on your website ranking you must understand the relationship between surfers and Search Engines!

How does this relationship work? Internet surfers are always looking for some kind of information! They do this by typing in some phrases related to their interest in to the search box provided by search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Surfers always want to find content relevant to their interest. How do search engines provide that kind of information to its users? They search all across the web looking for web sites, blogs, article directories, and even videos that have relevant content according to the keywords or key phrases entered in the search.

The search engines will also return websites that have content similar to those keywords and that really is what latent semantic indexing is – synonyms related to the primary keyword entered. A few years ago it was enough to fill your site with certain keyword phrases on every page and your site would have been selected “as relevant” to searched term! This became known as keyword stuffing and is no longer acceptable to either surfers or the search engines.

Many webmasters took advantage of that and they created websites that just had the aim to get to the first page of the search engines. Since then, search engines have improved their algorithm to ensure that its users get more relevant information to the searched term and hence keep “their customers”. You should note that the search engines will no longer index your site if you continue to use keyword stuffing.

Today it is not even enough to have written content that relates to the entered keyword phrase. Because of the “fight” with their competition, to keep their users, the four major search engines tend to develop algorithms that will think more like humans. That way they want to get content from web sites and articles that will give the exact searched for information to surfers.

And how do they do that? How can they get related content to the searched keyword phrase from the millions of web sites out there?

They developed an algorithm which relies on Latent Semantic Analysis and that system tries to understand the main theme of each web site by comparing the main searched keyword on different sites and tries to find the relationship of those keywords with synonym words and phrases. In simple terms, LSI keywords are synonyms of the main keyword phrase and LSI is abbreviation of Latent Semantic Indexing.

You can find various topics pertaining to the latent semantic analysis search and understand the importance of misspelling words, grammar etc.

By analyzing all these keywords and synonyms SE’s try to understand the overall theme of your website or content and to rank your site according to its relevance on a particular searched phrase. For that reason it is very important that you build your web site based on the main theme (or main keyword), supported by related sub themes or sub categories related to that theme.

To prove that this is what is actually happening, let’s do a test.

Go to Google and type in the term “shoes”. Look at the bolded words in the the returned description on the provided listing of relevant web sites. You can see that Google has bolded words shoe and shoes. Under the listing you will get results which will look something like that:

Searches related to: shoes

dress shoes designer shoes nike shoes prom shoes womens shoes dsw steve madden air force ones

Now type the same keyword with ~ symbol in front of your keyword and you will have then “~shoes”. After you press Search you will see that the words in bold which are in the description are now shoe, shoes, boots, footwear and even a word store where you have in description or in a title a word shoes.

Searches related to: ~shoes

boots store sandals shoes boots 2009 store handbags puma store stride rite shoes shoe brands shoes boots

That way you can see what a search engine like Google sees as relevant words to the word shoes!

If you understand that the main theme is very important to achieving a better ranking for your web site then you should avoid the mistake which many webmasters make by creating their web sites or blogs.

They have too many links or advertisements on their sites and on that way they’ve got what is called theme bleeding. And that means that they have links on their websites which can lead the search engine robots to follow this link to unrelated content web sites. If the content of that site is not related to your main theme your ranking will suffer significantly and this is why it is called theme bleeding.

You can find many samples where you can see that websites with lower page rank outperform websites with a higher page rank! That is proof that latent semantic analysis and indexing is more important than page rank. Probably pages with better ranking will have an advantage only if they have the same quality of content related to LSI keywords.

*Conclusion*

To create a web site or to write articles to be user friendly and search engine friendly you must have relevant content to the main theme and keyword. To find those keywords and key phrases you can use many free keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Tool, WordTracker free keyword suggestion tool and others.

As good as the free tools are to begin with, they do have disadvantages. You have limits on the number of the results obtained, or limits on filtering of your researched results and so on. Because of that I have upgraded by keyword research to using several professional keyword research tools to get a lot more accurate long tail keyword phrases on which my website content is based.

And I will talk about those keyword tools in detail in my forthcoming articles.