What is it?
According to Wikipedia, Latent Semantic Indexing is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text.
What?! You say you speak English? Oh! No problem! What this means in plain English is that when you write an article or post about a key word, certain other words normally occur in the same context. For instance, let’s say you were writing an article about schools. It would be normal to see the following words in the same article: students, teachers, teacher student ratio, classrooms, budgets, parents, curriculum, extra curricular activities, clubs, textbooks, books, schedules, grades…you get the idea.
Why Do I Care?
Not too very long ago, the way to achieve a #1 ranking with Google was to stuff your articles and posts full of your key work with no regard to the quality of the content. Those boys and girls at Google are pretty smart. They wanted to ensure that the readers had quality content to read on the internet instead of a bunch of garbage so they changed the magic formula. They now judge an article or post based on how many related keywords are in the article instead of how many times your keyword phrase appears in the article.
If you’re not on the first page of a Google search, your chances of being found by a potential reader decrease significantly. If there’s not anyone finding your site, there’s even less chance that any of your ads are being looked at much less clicked upon. Consequently, when you decide to sell your site, you’ll leave a lot of money on the table that could have been in your pocket.
Who Uses It?
Ultimately, Google uses it to rank your site. Since most people use Google to do their searches, it’s pretty important to rank in the first 3 or 4 choices for your keyword phrase as most folks don’t look any further than the first page of a search to get to the information for which they are looking.
Your competition is using it to gain ranking over you! Obviously, you won’t know this; however, your best insurance is to write content rich articles for your readers so that you don’t even have to be concerned about your competition.
Can I Leverage It?
Yes, you can. Find out your competitions keywords and write better articles and posts. If you don’t write well, hire someone who does write well to help you to get ahead! No one said you had to do it all. Finding out the keyword phrases that your competition is paying for and writing better articles for these phrases is even better!
Another way to leverage this concept is to sprinkle high paying keywords among your keyword phrases to raise the dollar value of the ads that Adsense is feeding to your blog so that when your reader clicks on one of your ads, you automatically make more per click. You will want to ensure that the high paying keyword actually fits in with your post or article. I would only use one extra high paying keyword per article to ensure you are playing by the rules and don’t get your Adsense account shut down by the nice boys and girls at Google.
Are There Tools to Help Me?
Once again, you’re in luck! I use a tool called BlogGlue Toolbox to assist me with my SEO when I’m posting my articles. It checks my title, description, keywords and document content and gives me suggestions on how I can write a better article. Best of all, this won’t cost you a dime! Talk about great insurance!
The bottom line is to show off a bit of your knowledge about your niche and give your readers great content. You will be richly rewarded for it.
