Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI, is not a new concept. LSI If you have been doing SEO on your site, then you have surely spent time researching the keywords and phrases that are the most likely to help your website rank higher on Google than your competitors. High search engine ranking, however, involves more than keyword density and selection. Search engines have become smarter after seeing the opportunity for abuse of their original algorithms, and now rely on a concept called latent semantic indexing to determine rankings.

Latent semantic indexing is an algorithmic determination of the words and phrases used in each section of text and considers the patterns which appear in proportion between words and phrases. The idea is that the quality can be set based on how keywords and phrases are used in relationship to one another. This is a huge improvement over the ‘quantity’ based way that originally looked mainly at density. This allows webmasters to provide high quality content written naturally so they can outrank junk sites that are keyword stuffed. Internet users also reap the rewards  from readily accessible and relevant content.

LSI requires the use of semantically related words on your website to get that all important higher search ranking.Using synonymous words and phrases in the content allows the search engines to truly see the value of your site.LSI considers website relevance by analyzing all of the content and  comparing relationships between words and phrasing. If you build a themed website, this will help your  ranking. Themed websites consist of articles that focus on a central topic. A website about dogs as pets shouold not have a bunch of cat articles – save those for the cat site. Otherwise you have reduced the relevance of your site to the main theme.

Latent semantic indexing evaluates not only the quality of the content but basics such as grammar, spelling, etc. Gone will be teh sites using cheap writers to spawn huge amounts of ‘SEO’ content. Instead, internet users will be presented with the sites that give valuable information they want, while website owners will have a strong incentive to fill their sites with well written, releant content. In short, the days of keyword stuffing are over. It’s time to fall back on good research and good writing in order to get higher search engine rankings.

When can you be held liable for something you recommend? When can someone conceivably take you to court and sue you for all you’ve got? The answer is – more often than you’d think.

In today’s sue-happy society, everyone seems to be working an angle. Spill hot coffee on yourself? Sue the person who sold it to you. Some guy went nuts and flew his plane into the building where your husband worked? Sue the widow. Your kid bullies another kid at school and gets detention? Sue the violent video game manufacturer.

Seriously, you can be sued for anything, so the best course to take is to cover yourself from all angles. If you promote a product, have a disclaimer saying that you cannot be held responsible for anyone who doesn’t get the results they want. If you dispense advice that could have legal / medical / whatever ramifications, remind everyone that you are not a doctor / medical professional / what have you.

This goes for websites that do reviews. If you decide to start or contribute to a review site, you need to be sure that you don’t leave yourself open for litigation in case the facial scrub makes their eyebrows fall out or the remote control car blows up their house.

OK, I’m being a little dramatic, but you get the idea. cross your ‘t’s, dot your ‘i’s, mind your ‘p’s and ‘q’s. You don’t want to end up on the hook for something beyond your control, just because you wrote something on a website or a blog that later bit someone in the butt.

Best course of action? Have a lawyer help draft up a standard disclaimer saying that what you write is only your opinion, and that you cannot be held liable for any harm, physical, financial or otherwise, resulting in someone using a service or product as a result of reading your review.

The same goes for dispensing medical advice – telling  someone that flax seeds are good for cancer is borderline – they could interpret it as meaning you are telling them to stop taking their cancer meds and eat flax seeds instead and they will be cured. (I’m assuming you don’t believe that flax seeds will actually CURE cancer.. right? Because that’s just nuts.)

You can never be too careful about protecting yourself against litigation! Think about it the next time you set yourself up as an authority on a subject. You never know what someone might do.

Do you have plenty of traffic but your site still isn’t making money? Try these five tips to increase conversions and reduce bounce rates.

1. Links, links, links. Your site will be ranked higher if you have high quality links, and higher SERPs position means better rankings. Directory submissions and article submission sites can help – try to find a niche and interlink your stuff together and always provide link-backs to your site.

2. Content, content, content. Make sure your headlines and subheadings grab attention. When someone is skimming your page, they read the headlines and subheads, if you can grab their interest, they’ll stick around. If not, sayonora, baby! Your content should be real, hard hitting, to the point and optimized for your main and long tail keywords. Don’t just think you can slap any old thing up and get hits.

3. PPC. Advertising works – but you have to do it right. Work out your budget, create bang up ads, split test, tweak and split test again, and for goodness sakes target effectively so you don’t waste your money. PPC can be either a great tool or a horrible money pit. Do it right.

4. Tell people what you can do for them, not how great your product is. They don’t care if it is made of 100 swan down – they want to know if it will keep them warm or not. Tell them what the benefits are instead of the features. Then they will be motivated to buy your product because they feel that it meets a need in their life. You can also use testimonials to make them feel confident since others have had their needs met as well.

5. Promote, use a blog, press releases, social networks – do everything you can to increase traffic from targeted locations where people are interested in what you have to say. The more places you pop up, the more attention people start paying to you.

Using these tips will make all the difference in your conversion rates and increase higher quality traffic to your site.

Do you have plenty of traffic but your site still isn’t making money? Try these five tips to increase conversions and reduce bounce rates.

Long ago and far away, there was a black hat tactic known as doorway page creation. It is mostly forgotten now, which is why some sneaky black hat SEOs are trying to revive the practice, calling it by a new name.

It used to be possible to increase the number of entry points to your website and therefore increase your website traffic. There is usually a splurge of battles for top rankings and extra traffic during holiday season., but other seasonal trends also make this type of tactics attractive to some unwary SEOs.

Black hat SEOs can either hand-create such pages manually, or implement  software to create multiple doorway pages, significantly increasing your numerical advantage as far as how many pages are on your site, and projecting the false image that you are an authority site with thousands of pages.

Of course, manually you’ll have to just plug in cheap, fast content in order to get enough pages out, and software generated pages also will not have any valuable content that can be used by the visitors. The doorway pages might not even be stored in the same server as the website to protect the website and misdirect any investigation – search engines would be on the trail, then not realize there were hundreds more pages hosted elsewhere.

Doorway pages get you into trouble because that they manipulate the search engines., taking advantages of loopholes in each engine’s ranking algorithm. Different doorway pages may have content that can please specific search engines. These pages won’t be shown to the real visitors in many cases (being mostly keyword stuffed gibberish) -  they are only meant for the search engines.

Dynamic pages served based on the IP and other parameters set by the web master come up for the search engine, but  when a real visitor clicks the pages, suddenly they are automatically redirected to a different page on the website. It’s really just cloaking, done old school.

Increasing keyword density using various keyword strings that do not make real sense allows these black hatters to get good rankings for the chosen keywords. If these pages are ranked well in the search engines, they can be used to send traffic to a particular page or website, often diverting the purpose of the search.

Webmasters discovered using door way pages run the risk of having their website banned from search engines’  indexes. When banned by Google, 60 to 70% of  traffic can instantly disappear. Don’t be tempted to cloak or use hundreds of doorway pages on your site. Go with well put together landing pages, and keep your online reputation intact!

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