| |
| |
|
SEO Information |
|
|
|
LSI and Link Popularity
When Paypal's official Web site no longer ranked #1 in Google on a search for "paypal," it was obvious that Google had become more aggressive in penalizing sites with "unnatural" backlink anchor text. Although the high-profile Paypal example has since been rectified, thousands of webmasters are suffering the consequences of not ranking for even their official company name, let alone their top keywords. It is important for search engine optimizers to understand both how anchor text penalties are being applied and how LSI ensures that anchor text variance will not dilute a link popularity building campaign. Anchor Text Penalties In the past year, webmasters have found that the aggressive link popularity building tactics that work well in search engines such as Yahoo! do not fare well in Google. Google has implemented several features to filter out sites that appear to have an unnatural backlink structure; one of these features seems to be specifically penalizing sites with unnatural backlink anchor text. It has always been an SEO best practice to use descriptive anchor text in both external and internal links. But search engine optimizers have often focused on a single keyword phrase when choosing anchor text, especially if their topic has one keyword that receives vastly more traffic than any secondary keywords. Since good links are hard to come by, they do not want to "waste" any of those backlinks with anchor text that does not contain their main keyword. The drawback to this approach is that it can be interpreted as unnatural by a search engine. A site with organic, passively-obtained backlinks will have a wide variety of backlink anchor text variations such as: "official site title," "keyword," "keyword synonym," "www.thesite.com" and even "click here." If the vast majority of a site's backlink anchor text is simply "keyword," it is obvious to an algorithm that the link popularity was not obtained organically. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Basics Let's now touch upon the myth I mentioned before, that if a backlink's anchor text does not contain your Web site's main keyword, its power is wasted. The concept of latent semantic indexing, which may be more fully implemented by major search engines in the near future, will prove this myth to be false. Latent semantic indexing can help overcome the "vocabulary mismatch" problem when a human uses a search engine. Individual words do not always provide reliable evidence about the conceptual meaning of a document. For instance, a Web page that is highly relevant to the term "laptop" may never use the term "notebook," however it is clear to a human being that "notebook" is often used as a synonym for "laptop." While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the mathematics behind LSI, its implications for search algorithms are simple. LSI can use statistical techniques to create a semantic analysis for any given query topic. In practice, this means that a page can be considered relevant for a particular keyword, even if it does not contain that keyword. For instance, a page that is considered relevant for "laptop" can also be considered relevant for "notebook" even if it does not contain the word "notebook," if LSI determines that "notebook" is semantically related to "laptop." The principle can be applied to backlinks as well. Backlinks with anchor text that do not contain your Web site's main keyword, but instead contain a synonym or related word, may still be giving your site a bonus for the main keyword. Link Popularity Building Best Practice: Vary Your Anchor Text The recent increase in penalties given to sites with unnatural backlink anchor text, along with the possible implementation of LSI, should give webmasters motivation to vary their backlink anchor text heavily. Rather than seeking to only obtain links using their main keyword, webmasters should include synonyms, variations and related words. Certainly no single keyword variation should be used the majority of the time; rather, the text of all links should vary widely, just as they would if the links were obtained passively. This will ensure a site's improvement in the SERPs, without drawing a penalty flag. Andy Hagans is a search engine optimization consultant who specializes in link popularity building and risk management. Visit http://www.andyhagans.com for more information. See http://www.andyhagans.com/link-building.php for more information on Mr. Hagans' link building services.
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Marketing Articles: Getting A Better Search Engine Rank For All Of Your Pages! In one of my articles, I discussed how to market your web site link twice. It detailed out how to promote not only www. Submitting Your Site to Search Engines and Directories Regardless of which type of business you currently have, you will definately want to have a website and begin marketing it on the world wide web. After you have designed your website, the next step is to ensure it is properly "optimized", meaning that it's body text(the text you see), title and meta tags(the text that you don't) all have the words you are trying to be found for on the search engine results. SEO: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly I seem to have created quite a stir, on a particular SEO forum recently. In fact, rumor has it, at one point, my article, "Google's Trap, DMOZ's Nap, And Yahoo!'s Crap" was the hottest topic discussed on this particular forum. How To Indirectly Get To The Top Of Search Engines There are millions of web sites trying to get listed in the top 20 spots of the major search engines. That amounts to a lot of competition! Even if your website can't get in the Top 20, you can use indirect ways to get it there. Search Engine Optimisation - Why And How To Do It In the following article I will give you some basic guidelines to follow in order to help get your web site ranked at the top of popular organic search engines. More detailed information can be found in our DIY Internet Marketing Guide "Start at the Beginning" Click here for an excerpt: http://www. How To Start An Internet Business - Meta Tags and Keyword Density Okay, you have a domain name, layout and content. Now we get to a step that will go a long way to determining how the site will rank. The Secret Benefit Of Search Engine Optimisation: Increased Usability A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don't realise is that by optimising their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimise it for their site visitors. Link Reputation - How to Improve Search Engine Rankings One of the most overlooked strategies to improve searchengine rankings is building your link reputation. This linkpopularity strategy is just as important or equal tocreating keyword rich content pages. The Best and Easiest Google-Friendly Change to Your Web Site No matter who you are or how much you pay for web site advertising, free search engine traffic is probably responsible for a big part of your business. So why make your web site so hard for search engines to figure out?Luckily, it seems like in the recent years people have paid attention to SEO, moved their sites over to CSS, abolished "table" and "font" HTML tags, started using the H1 tag around their titles. From Corpora to Matching Making effective use of the Internet is increasingly about creating better and more intelligent applications and search engines. Here is a brief introduction into how search engines work:01) Define the corpus, search space/data;02) Separate the corpus into documents;03) Generate features for each document;04) Generate a representation of each document;05) Study the feature/vector space;06) Cluster documents;07) Reduce dimensionality;08) Accept input Queries;09) Find the cosine angles against the query vector; 10) Find the sought vector column;11) Output results to user in some way;Each document in a corpus (database) is described by a set of keywords called index terms. 7 Simple Steps to Spy on Your Online Competition and Acheive a High Page Rank My Grandfather ran a small Grocery Store and when you wouldask him a Question about his Business he would laugh andreply does Macy's Tell Gimbel's. (At the Time Gimbel's wasa major Competitor of Macy's in the New York DepartmentStore Market. Search Engine Marketing 101: What Search Engines See When They Visit Your Web Site If you have a Web site, have you ever wondered what a search engine sees when it visits your site to add the site to its index? Do you know that it doesn't see the beautiful graphics or the fancy Web design? Do you know that it only sees the source code, or the "skeleton" of your Web site?Do you realize that knowing this little tidbit of information and doing something about it can make a huge difference in your search engine rankings and, ultimately, the success of your online business?One very important thing that you need to remember is: the search engines like simplicity. The simpler your Web site is, the easier it is for the engine to determine what your Web site is about. Expert Help From Google Answers Web users turn to search engines for answers to their questions. This is usually done through various levels of searching the engine's database. Google Patent Application - Linking The recent patent application filed by Google details numerous items the search engine uses to rank web pages. The specific application is summarized as:"A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data. Are Search Engines Worth It Any More? The "Number One" Question - the question that I (and probably every other Internet marketing expert on the planet) am most frequently asked: "How do I get to be Number One in the search engines for widgets? After all, my company is the world's leading provider of widgets - it's ridiculous that these other nobody companies are coming up in search engines ahead of us . . Search Engine Marketing: Choosing Keyword Phrases Selecting the right keyword phrases is the key to a successful search engine marketing campaign.Industry statistics indicate that as many as 85% of all initial Website visits begin with a search engine query, and according to researchers NPD Group, more online purchases originate from search engine listings than from any other source. Guide to Getting Linked Getting links from other websites pointing to your site can sometimes seem very hard and time consuming. There are several ways to get people interested in your site, you've just got to be creative with it and think more in terms of putting yourself in the other webmaster's shoes- figure out what the advantages are for them to be linked to you!One thing that you often hear is that to attain a high Page Rank thru Google, (which, let's face it, is the Big Daddy of Search Engines) that you have to link to other high PR sites. How to Top Google by Writing Articles Search engines determine their rankings based on two things: Is your site relevant? (Optimized for certain keywords) Is your site important? (Many links back to your site from other sites) Only when you address both of these considerations are you guaranteed of making an impact. Your degree of success depends on how hard you try and how many other people you're competing against (and how hard they're trying). Increase Your Link Popularity for Free Among the many things you need to worry about for high search engine rankings,link popularity is among the most important. Link popularity refers the how many other websites on the internet link back to your website. HTML and Search Engine Optimization - What You Dont Know Can Kill You When it comes to search engine optimization there is a lot of information available, some accurate, some not. If you really want to know what is going on regarding your website and how to best optimize it for good results with the search engines, you need to do some SEO research.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
