The term has been around for a while. It certainly sounds like an important term in the world of SEO. What does it really mean and is it relevant to today’s SEO world. In short, Latent Semantic Indexing is when the search engines look at a keyword and then look at the words around that keyword, then look at the context of the sentence or phrase the keword is located in.
A comment left by OneMansGoal.com a Make Money Online blog on my posting titled “Effective Use of Anchor Text Links” got me thinking about the whole anchor keyword – keyphrase subject. While I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules concerning LSI, I do believe it is important to choose your key words / key phrases carefully when using them within the body of text. If I am writing about the decrease in big truck sales due to the economy in one of my blogs, I certainly do not want to have a phrase in the middle of that posting or sentence that references employment on riverboats. There may be some connection in the back of my mind but to just arbitrarily throw a non releveant term in the sentence or group of sentences just to get a link could very well throw my whole link effort out the window.
Does this make sense? I guess what I am saying is keep the words around your anchor keyword link relevant to the topic of discussion and don’t try to slip one in on the search engines. Taking it a step further I believe that within the body of text, a keyword phrase is more important and of better use than just a keyword. Once again making sure that keyword phrase is relevant to the context of the text around it.
Latent Semantic Indexing is probably not something set in stone but it does make sense to follow this particular type of sentence and paragraph structure.
What are you thoughts on anchor text links and anchor text phrases?
I have a website that ranks on Google frong page for 5 search terms and in this particular niche (yacht crew jobs) gets about 70 to 100 unique visitors a day. About 3 months ago adsense stopped converting. I tried various formats and restructuring of the site but to no avail. I have gone back to the same format (blog) that I was using when I was getting about a 10-20 percent click through rate.
Now I am lucky if I get one click a day. Anyone have any thoughts as to why this has stopped all of a sudden? This is the only one of my websites where this has happened so I am sure has something to do with the site itself. I can’t see that I am violating any terms and with rare exception, the content is written by me and referencing the original news article.
Check out www.shipscaptainandcrew.com and see if you have any ideas………. thanks………eric
While doing my daily blog reading I read a post at a Make Money blog called OneMansGoal.com which has a lot of good info about, you guessed it, making money online. The post that caught my eye was titled “Question About Varying Anchor Text” and deals with the options before us all in choosing the proper anchor text link format as well as long tail keywords.
I am a big advocate of using anchor text links through out a website. Whether in the main menu, the footer or in the body of the text itself (which is where I think the highest effectiveness comes from) anchor text links are a powerful tool in your SEO campaign.
Marc gives two examples of a slight variation on his keyword based anchor text and asks the question which one will work better.
Here is his question and example:
- Now my question will “make money” links to onemansgoal.com help http://onemansgoal.com/441/easy-ways-for-kids-to-make-money/ rank better for “kids make money”
- Second question is will the links for “kids make money” to http://onemansgoal.com/441/easy-ways-for-kids-to-make-money/ help onemansgoal.com rank better for “make money”
In my opinion there is a balance between how long your anchor text should be and the amount of corresponding searches there are. More than three or four words in your anchor text and you really start to get in a very narrow area of searches. On the flip side two or less and you are in a broad area that can be way too big. With Google looking at the text on either side of a keyword link the proper use of a keyword based anchor “phrase” can help that particular subject rank better.
Yes it can all be a bit confusing and there is a lot of trial and error. In the end I agree with Marc in his example that both will work, but the more refined then the more your visitors are likely to act on your subject because you have provided and exact answer.
What is your opinion??
I have been working on one of my niche sites the past couple of weeks. The initial search term was kind of broad but has a large adsense payout. With almost 9 million returns for the two primary searches I realized that this was going to be a challenge to achieve good search return rankings. As I started to research my information and develop pages and postings I started to find the sub-niche that would produce even higher payouts with only a 600K total search return. It is a lot easier to compete with 600K than 9 million.
I also found that there is much more information available on the internet on the sub-niche as well as more current news to draw my postings from. After discovering this new area I went ahead and modified the entries in my All In One SEO plug in as well as page title and descriptions. I also modified the footer code include a slight variation of the new primary search term and now I just need to wait for the site to be re-indexed and see what happens.
As usual I am not using any AdWords or paid inbound links to promote the site. I am a true beliver in the long term committment to a site to produce enough quality content on a regular basis that the site will stand on its own merit and people will link in voluntarily.
Once the site is re-indexed by Google and others and I see how it moves, I will post and update. Who knows, I may even find a sub-niche within the new one after this is done to refine it more.
Which would you rather have; 100 happy, satisfied visitors or top ten search engine placement? I understand top ten placement will bring you a lot of visitors, or at least in theory it should. That of course depends on the subject of your website.
After giving this question some careful thought I believe I would rather have the 100 happy, satisfied visitors. After all those happy customers have found what they are looking for and will probably refer my site to their friends and family. Happy customers talk up your website. Search engines don’t……..they just rank and list. Happy customers are more likely to purchase services and products again and again. They will also bookmark your site and if you have an opt-in email list, will probably sign up.
I know I may be rambling here and I suppose there are those who will argue this point and that is ok. Give me 20 or 30 niche sites with a hundred happy customers each and I will be very very happy…….
