Author: Malcolm Lambe

The First Page of Google - that's what its all about isn't it? We all use Google and the other Search Engines every day. And none of has time to trawl through all the listings - sometimes there's hundreds and thousands of them. I think most of us don't go past the first three or four pages before giving up in frustration or entering another search word or term. So that's where we want our site to be - the First Page of Google Search or Yahoo or one of the other Top Search Engines.

BTW did you know the Chinese Search Engine Baidu is one of the Top Three Search Engines in the world? But Google is still the Big Daddy of them all - accounting for 63.98% of U.S. search traffic. Yahoo! comes in second at around 23%.

As I've said elsewhere, you must have decent stories and/or articles up on your site - good original content. Just scraping tired old content from other websites isn't going to cut it. You've got to give the Search Engines something they can get their teeth in.

In the past you could get a decent Google page position by stuffing your article with keywords and by building up decent links to get yourself a good Google Pagerank - the higher the PageRank the more authority your site was deemed to have and hence the higher in it was placed in Google pages.

But now all of that has changed. Too much manipulation of the system was going on - Search Engine Optimization companies were using every trick in the book to get their clients ranked higher.

All that has changed with the introduction of Google's LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing. What you need to know is how to make LSI work for you.

The good news is even though the term Latent Semantic Indexing sounds extremely technical it really is a commonsense way for the search engines to tell what a webpage is really about.

Only a couple of years ago people would try to manipulate their search engine position by "Keyword Stuffing" their webpages.

They would spend way too much time trying to discover the perfect keyword density that would render Google, Yahoo, and MSN helpless in not giving their sites a top ten ranking.

Google realized that it needed a better way for its bots to ascertain the true theme of a webpage and that's what Latent Semantic Indexing is all about.

The search engines through their huge databases are able to use LSI to associate certain terms with concepts when indexing web pages.

In other words instead of relying heavily on the number of occurrences of a particular keyword on a page to determine what that page is about they are now able to ascertain a more accurate assessment of a page's theme by how words are associated on the page.

Here's an example of how LSI works in its simplest terms.

Through word association Google is able to tell if a page with the word "Apple" on it is about a fruit or a well-known computer company by reading the whole page referencing its database and seeing how the combination of certain words resulted in what that page was about.

If the webpage with "Apple" on it also contained words like computer, software, RAM, iMovie or Mac, Google will know that the page deals with the computer branded Apple.

If the page with "Apple" on it contained words like orchard, Granny Smith, pip, seed and the like, Google will know what to rank this page for based on the theme of the entire page not just the amount of times a particular keyword is referenced.

Why is LSI a good thing for the average webmaster?

Well because if you write your pages naturally about a theme keeping the users experience in mind you will have a much greater chance of ranking higher in the search engines then ever before.

LSI can really help you get higher up in the search engine pages if you take the time to understand how to implement it into your copy.

If you want to be ranked higher in the search engines, you should write content and use relevant links. But don't totally disregard keywords. You could use some of the free keyword research tools or you could pay an SEO hundreds of dollars to do the work for you. Another option (and the best bet in my book - I'm fascinated with it) is to use Google's own Keyword Discovery Tool.

This tool is a real boon to site-owners. You start with Google Search by typing in your keyword or phrase and picking the first site that comes up. Copy its URL. Then go to the Google's Keyword Discovery Tool, click the "Site-Related Keywords" tab and paste the URL there. Study the results and use groups of related keywords with links on your page to develop strong on-page factors. Beauty eh? And best of all - its Free!

I don't want to give too much away but I've managed to considerably increase the Google Adsense earnings of my site by following my own advice. And whilst I haven't consciously set out to be on the front page of Google for various subjects, lately I find I am. And I think it's down to the efforts I've put into writing original content. That and a few tweaks and tricks that you can learn on Google's own Adsense pages and/or in forums. And obviously my Traffic has gone up accordingly. Which is really gratifying. My dream is to make a decent living out of my sites. I'm a long way off that yet but I'm getting better and better at it.

About the Author:
Malcolm Lambe is an Australian blogger/vlogger married to a French woman and living in Paris with one and a half kids. He writes on a diverse range of subjects - none of which he's expert at. He drives a 14 year old Mercedes Benz and drinks 1664 beer. His main site is Welcome to Wallyworld. "