With Google cracking down on keyword stuffing and anchor text manipulation, the Search Engine Optimization community is raving about the new way to get ranked in Google - Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Why are they trying to sell you on this new technique? Because they’re all about to lose their jobs and it’s their last ditch effort for a bit of attention!

What is LSI?

To quote Aaron Wall from SEOBook:

In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant.

To illustrate, if you want a great ranking in Google under the phrase “buy laptops” your entire site should revolve around variations of this phrase and use related terms such as “purchase” and “notebook” on all of your pages. By doing this for all your content, you’re giving Google the impression that you have an ‘authority site‘ on the subject and you’ll accordingly rank higher.

Similarly, you’ll need to vary the anchor text that links to your site so that it doesn’t just come from one keyword. That’s how John Chow got penalized for the term ‘make money online’ and why he now encourages that you link to him with a variety of similar keywords.

In the end, better rankings will be given to authority sites instead of keyword-filled pages.

Why it will kill SEO

The more I learn about LSI, the more I’m left with a feeling of “D’uh! Isn’t that obvious?”

It makes obvious sense that a site devoted to a topic that uses variations of a phrases will have a better ranking in Google than a single page on the topic that uses one version of the phrase.

For those who practice SEO, it means that all the advice can be shrunk into two simple principles:

1. Write naturally
   
2. Let people link to you naturally.

That’s hardly revolutionary. I’ll go one step further and say that LSI dictates that you should not worry about ranking well in Google if you want to rank well in Google. That makes any $200 per hour SEO consultant redundant and you can forget about anyone buying a $49.95 e-book that talks about keyword density, title tags and anchor text - they’re as useless as meta tags now!

Forget about SEO

While LSI is the only factor in Google’s algorithm, the more weight that is given to it gives more strength to the argument that Search Engine Optimization as we know it is dead and the new way dictates simply building a useful, relevant site. But you were doing that already, right?

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