Latent Semantic Indexing - What Is It

Take a look at this blog from Andy Hagans who seems to know what he's talking about when it comes to link building. As I tell my clients link popularity is increasingly important part of search engine optimisation. Gone are the days when we could rely on a reciprocal linking strategy - it is widely assumed that Google discounts these types of links or in extreme cases penalises sites with large numbers of reciprocal links - particularly if the number of links have increased rapidly. Google in particular is looking for links between similarly relevant WebPages. This makes sense as a webpage with loads of information about laptops with many links to and from other WebPages also with loads of info about laptops is probably going to be very relevant to the subject of laptops.

However, if you then artificially create lots of backlinks with anchor text all containing exactly the same keyword phrase then the major search engines are increasingly going to smell a rat. Naturally occurring backlinks will be from a variety of sources all using slightly different terms and anchor text. Latent Semantic Indexing LSI uses complex statistical algorithms to look for patterns. On the upside this means that links from WebPages containing semantically similar terms to the word laptop such as notebook will be judged to be relevant.

So if you’re building your link popularity don't get too tied up on using those keywords all the time try looking for sites with relevancy for terms with similar meanings.