Latent Semantic Indexing and SEO

I just want to make a post today to address a quick question that I have received in the last week.

First of all I want to thank Joan Whitebook for reading my blog and taking time to respond with a question.

Q: She asks if my posts include the recent changes to the Google formula.

A: Google spends millions and millions of dollars perfecting alogorithms that produce the optimal experience for the searcher. They are not concerned about those who are interested in promoting their sites. Unless you buy Google Pay Per Click. Therefore, they do not announce and are actually quite secretive about any of their new features to the search engine.

That being said, there has been a leak that has made it's way into certain circles that I think is very helpful. The idea is that Google will now be largely driven by what they call Latent Semantic Indexing. This is a fancy way to say that google will not just use the keywords in your web page, but that they will use all the words in the document and rank they relate to each other.

Here is an example:

Old Way

Primary importance: Tiltle Tag: St. Paul Realtor Body of Site: Repeat those words in the body of your text throughout your web pages.

New Way

Still important to use this technique above, but there is an additional step. The rest of your text needs to reflect the "theme" of your targeted keywords. (ie, there needs to be writing about st. paul, the community, the real estate there.)

So, the point is, you need to go a step beyond just including keywords in title tags and text body. Write your site in such a way that a computer alogorithm can distill it down into your desired theme and give you favorable search rankings.

Ciao