Have you ever heard of Latent Semantic Indexing – or LSI, for short?  It’s a long name for a really cool search result you get in Google when searching for something.

Have you ever searched in Google and noticed that the words you typed in to search for are bolded in the search results, but not always in the exact order you entered them? That’s called latent semantic indexing – simply put, Google will show you sites that contain your search words, even if those words are not all together in one phrase on the site.

This is huge, because your site can actually rank for keywords/phrases that you didn’t intent to optimize your site for.  You need to have all the words of the phrase on your site, but Google picks out those words and bolds them to match the keyword phrase being searched. That’s LSI in action.

I have a latent semantic indexing example for you… recently I had someone contact me saying they found me via Google when they searched for “premium web cart outsourcing” and I was #1 in the search results for that phrase!

I do work with Premium Web Cart and I do offer outsourcing services (here and here). Like most marketers, I do keyword research and optimize my site for keyword phrases that show folks are actually searching for that phrase; but I did not specifically optimize my site for “premium web cart outsourcing”.  It was latent semantic indexing in action that got me that #1 spot in Google.

In this example of LSI in action,  I got a new client based on a LSI search result that I did not set out to optimize my site for! Sweet!

SEO (search engine optimization) is its own field of expertise. The SEO field is one that’s tricky and where you need to be very careful – because the almighty Google doesn’t like it when you over SEO your site and stuff it with keywords – that’s considered spam!

Do your keyword research, so you will know these three key things:

1. What your main keyword phrase is: Find your main keyword phrase  - and make sure that phrase is getting searched already.
2. What are your long-tail phrases. Find some long-tail (3 or more word phrases) phrases that are related to your main phrase or compliment that phrase.  These could end up being LSI phrases for you.
3. Write your content for people, not search engines; and mention the products, services, programs or systems that you use or recommend within the content you write. Again, these could end up being LSI phrases that you rank for, without even trying!

Google has been on a crack down recently, first with the Panda update and more recently with the Penguin update.

Panda Update: They de-indexed sites that were using what they consider black hat SEO and using blog link networks to build backlinks to their site.  Those blog networks, and all the sites within those blog networks got de-indexed over night.  So if they were #1 in Google, they dropped out of site and their organize search engine traffic stopped.

Penguin Update: Sites that were overly SEO’d, meaning they stuffed their site unnaturally with keyword phrases and were essentially written for search engines and not people.  If you would not talk to a person face-to-face and use the same natural language flow and usage of words or phrases, then Google considers that spam and de-indexed those sites.  You wouldn’t say your keyword phrase 5, 6 or 10 times in a few paragraphs when talking to someone; so don’t talk that way to Google either.

Keep it real – keep it natural = Latent Semantic Indexing

When writing content on your site, keep it real. On your About or Services pages and/or in the blog posts you write, mention the products you work with, brands you use…. talk to people. Give them valuable content, helpful content and in the case of LSI, “name dropping” (aka: mentioning people, products, services) is a good thing, as you could rank for phrases you never thought you would!

Do your due diligence in doing keyword research for your niche; but write your content and provide quality, helpful information written for people. Google knows how to read, they can tell if you’re writing for them, or for your target audience – just provide the quality and let Google sort out the rest.  Trying to ‘game the search engine system’ can – and will – get you banned, if you aren’t very careful.

Did your site get de-indexed via the Panda or Penguin updates?

Does your site rank for any LSI phrases?

To YOUR Success,

Traci

Permalinks is an often discussed topic among those using WordPress; and deciding which permalink structure to use is confusing. Ask someone which is the best permalink structure to use and you'll get a myriad of answers.

Most folks realize that you should not use the default permalink setting that looks like:

http://genesisblogging.com/?p=123

That's not SEO friendly at all.

Years ago, I used the date and name based structure.

http://genesisblogging.com/2010/6/16/post-name

This is better, but really long. Having the date in there isn't really a benefit.

So in more recent years, I've used the category and postname structure. This has been good, as you can use broad keyword phrases for your category  names, and more specific long-tail phrases within your post titles to get a SEO friendly URL happening.

http://genesisblogging.com/affordable-widgets/blue-square-widgets/

While this works good for SEO (even if it can get a bit long), the bottom line is that there is a whole other issue that was being overlooked: performance.

Sites that grow to be really large, with lots of posts and pages, and that use the %category%/%postname%/ structure, are forcing WordPress to store and then render all this extra data when pages are served up to the site visitor.

Why or how is this a problem?

The category and postname fields are text fields. So it forces WordPress to store all this extra information in your database and makes WordPress work harder to distinguish pages from posts.

Here is a quote straight from WordPress.org on this issue:

• Make sure to end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.
• For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.

So, what does this mean for you and your WordPress sites?

For best performance and results, use this custom permalink structure:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

The postname will still make your URLs SEO-friendly; the post ID will make them shorter and make less work for WordPress (and store less data) to deliver your content quickly to your site visitor.

Changing  Your Permalinks the SEO-friendly Way

To change your permalinks structure without causing broken 404 errors on your site, or losing any ground with the search engines, I recommend this plugin: Dean's Permalinks Migration

This plugin does all the hard work for you, automatically creating 301 redirects for your links, instead of you having to update your .htaccess file with a ton of 301 redirects manually. 

Hope this helped you!

To YOUR Success,

Traci

P.S. If you have any questions about permalinks, post them in the comments section below.

Internet Marketing SEO Method = Google Page One

Wow! This is so amazing! Six weeks ago I attended the NAMS workshop in Atlanta, Georgia. While there, one of the many useful things we were taught was this Google Page One formula method to get a web site on the first page of Google in less than 24 hours. One woman actually accomplished this while at the workshop!

So here it is, six weeks later, and I am just now getting around to applying this method. What I did was take a brand new domain, that obviously had no web site built yet, no backlinks or anything (this is actually a brand new outsourcing service business that I started) and I followed the steps in this report and sure enough – it worked!!

Check out the video to see proof:

Now go get the report and try it for yourself!

Google Page One Fast

To YOUR Success,

Traci Knoppe

P.S. After you have gotten the report and applied the methods, please come back here and comment and let me know your results.