Latent semantic search: its effect on SEO and page ranking

Written by Guest Author on February 25, 2013 – 4:57 pm -

The SEO industry has seen a four-fold increase in the past three years with all the business web sites and blogs tirelessly working to increase their content’s visibility in the internet searches. This competition resulted in the origin of several SEO techniques for increasing the web site rankings given by the search engines. These techniques mainly concentrate on the usage of keywords that the users will most likely look for and it resulted in some SEOs filling the content cleverly with those keywords for their own gains. The end result of this process is that several worthy web pages lacked visibility.

To counteract this, the search engines came up with a new concept in their search algorithms which is called Linear Semantic Search (more commonly known as Linear Semantic Indexing or LSI). It targets not only on the specific keywords that are being searched for, but also on their semantic relationship with the other contents of the page and other common words that are related to them. The prominent characteristic of this method is its capacity to dig out the conceptual content of a web page through forming associations among the terms occurring in related contexts. For example, if you search for the word ‘ppi claims’, you will get different results like ‘Reclaim PPI’, ‘Mis-sold PPI’ and ‘ppi claims – no win, no fee’ all of which are related to the keyword.

It fueled the organic search by searching for relevance instead of the traditional way of looking for the keywords that match with the text which is being searched for. This method also put a check on the backlink and keyword spammers and many other black-hat SEO techniques finally proclaiming that the content is the ultimate key for better rankings. The introduction of this process has done a world of good not only for the web site owners, but also the internet users as it increased the probability of finding the exact information they are looking for.

LSI revolutionized the way of search as the algorithm looks into the pages as a human does essentially basing on relevance. Here are a few advices on how to implement LSI for your web site.

  • Use the webmaster tools provided by different search engines to scrutinize the indexing your web pages and make the necessary changes.
  • Adopt using the correct keywords in all parts of the content like titles, meta-tags, web links, image titles, etc.
  • Avoid stuffing your content with key words or else it will be considered to be spammed by the search engines.
  • Consult an SEO professional if you cannot do it by yourself. A little investment can pay you good results.
  • Constantly research on the keywords that are more searched for because the trends of searching vary constantly according to the time of the year, geographical locations, etc.

To stay ahead in the race of ‘Internet Marketing’, constantly modifying your web site for standing against the linear semantic search is one of the most important SEO techniques.

About the Author:

This guest post is contributed by Zara, a Guest blogger from UK. She has written many articles on SEO, technology and finance. Apart from blogging she does research on ppi claims . Catch her @financeport

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