Worldwideticketing.com
Quick Links: Search Engine Optimisation
| Search Engine Marketing
 |
E-mail this to a friend |  |
Printer Version |  |
Search Engine Optimisation |
A “free” natural high ranking in popular search engine in the right market can be worth millions. But the question is how to achieve these rankings? Competent webmasters are forever optimizing web pages to try and achieve top ranks on search engines. Their task is anything but easy, because the algorithms used by search engines are complex and ever-changing. There are a number of factors like content, keyword density, meta tag optimization of keywords and good inbound links and external links are well-known optimization techniques. But there is an extra factor that you need to understand and position on your website to achieve that coveted top spot on Google. The technology goes by the name of LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing, which has been implemented by Google and other top search engines to directly affect its ranking algorithm. Let us find out some more information about LSI to be able to discover the pathway to a page ranking success story.
Let us go back to the basics. We know a synonym is “a word or phrase having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or other words in a language”. For example, “buy” is synonymous with “purchase”. So if we Google the word “buy”, the results that appear on the screen have a relation with ‘buy” – buying, what to buy something etc. Also, we can judge a word to be polysemous if it has two senses of the words whose meanings are related. For example, the word “wood” can have two meanings: a) a piece of tree b) a geographical area with many trees. Now let us apply these theories to Google’s search algorithm.
If you type in the word “apple” in Google’s search box and hit the return key, the first page displays results related to “apple – the computer company”, and not the apple which grows on trees in orchards. But if you change the search keywords to, let’s say, “apple juice” Google shows his smartness by showing results pertaining to the apple fruit rather than the computer biggie. Surprised how Google does it? Well, here is the place where LSI steps in. The LSI technology is basically an information retrieval system which is based upon the processing of natural human language into a mathematical form which a computer can understand, process and verify. The use of semantics, which is basically the study of meaning in communication, lies at the core of the process. From this, we get other terms like synonyms and polysemy, as discussed above. Google’s extensive thesaurus is based on Latent Semantic Indexing, so the search engine gives higher Page Ranks to the websites who have the authorities over a particular keyword or phrase, like in the case of “apple”.
A search engine decides the theme and focus of a page by visiting it regularly, during which the serach engine spider’s web crawl. With the help of LSI, the spider also realizes the importance of secondary and tertiary elements for deciding the page’s focus. Now, with the addition of LSI in the search algorithm, the search engine is able to capture and understand the link that exists between the many websites which talk about these terms or phrases together. So the more often those terms appear together, the more related they appear to be. So, a Semantic Index is created finally with the help of this gathered knowledge in the form of links.
If you want to see LSI in action, let me give you a simple tool to find semantic terms: Presently and by default, Google uses LSI to produce search results. So if you search for “apple”, the text snippets show the word “apple” as highlighted. Now, precede the term “apple” with a ~ (tilde) sign, that is “~apple”, and watch the difference: The words that are now emboldened are “Mac”, “Windows”, “G4”, “Computer” etc. So these are the terms that Google has determined to be relevant to “apple” and the displayed web pages would include these terms.
LSI compares the content of your website with that of other websites that have high trust in your type of market, to determine the relevance of a certain website. These authority (high trust) websites are supposed to be top-rated experts in their subject of interest and Google learns and takes notes from these sites. Search engines utilize LSI to compare words, concepts and structures of your pages with these authority sites. All of your site’s pages contribute to the status of your current authority on Google. Hence, for higher rankings you need to convince Google that your content is relevant and functional. Also, LSI does not apply to a single page, but the whole of your website so it becomes very essential for you to structure your site correctly with the help of specific themes and sub-themes that are relevant to the core values of your websites.
Although, Google is right now at the cutting-edge of Latent Search Indexing technology, others like MSN and Yahoo! while still giving more weight age to keywords, are in the process of welcoming the change and inculcating the technology into their search algorithms. Although we are not fully aware of all the implications of LSI currently yet it is important for us to apply whatever knowledge we have about the subject to optimize our sites to achieve and maintain our Page Ranks in the near future. Here are a few tips to get you started:
