Patrick McDowell's Blog

Using latent semantic content in your posts can help you rank for the terms you want using less keyword density, and still being just as effective. As search engine algorithms become more and more complex, latent semantic indexing is going to become more and more popular.

What is Latent Semantic Content?

Say the keyword you are trying to rank for is public school funding. In the old days you could just repeat that ten times, drop some links and you were good to go. Obviously it is not that easy anymore, and we can really only use the keywords a handful of times before it becomes spammy.

We can use the keywords as little as once or twice and still rank just as high, if we use words that are related to the subject throughout our content. Look at the chart below:

Google sees all of these keywords as related. Thus using any of these keywords is just as good as using the keyword itself. In reality you should use latent semantic content as much as possible, simply because it looks all the more natural. Remember if your are wearing the white hat, you are writing for people, not search engines.

How Do I Know What Google Considers Latent Semantic?

Luckily, the big G made that easy for us. Check out this link, and look at the search box. All you need to do is put a simple tilde (~) before your keywords, and any word in bold under your results is considered latent semantic.

Okay so there is a lot of confusion on this subject, and I do mean A LOT of confusion. So I am going to explain exactly what PageRank is, to the best of my ability, and keep it as simple as possible. And hopefully this will clear up all the damn flame wars that go on in forums, not talking about DP of course!

Alright so according to the great Wikipedia, “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”

Wtf you ask? I know this seems confusing at first, but it’s really quite simple. Google assigns a number between zero and ten to each and every html file in your website, with the exclusion of ones you block from it, based on how much Google trusts the content on your website. If you are new to PageRank, I suggest installing the Google Toolbar to your favorite browser. There is a nice, simple tool that will display the PR of every page you visit:

Click the image to make it larger if you need to. It is worth noting that this toolbar does not give you a real-time representation of your current PR, but more of a “screenshot” of your PR when Google last checked. Google tends to check  and update every three or four months. If you are a devout follower of any number of webmaster forums, you may notice a buzzing about a “PR update” once and a while. That’s what this is.

In its simplest sense, PageRank is the transfer, containment, and distribution of trust from Google.

I could get into all the mathematics behind it, but believe me they are all kinds of complicated. Here are some basic points to keep in mind:

• Every single outbound link on your website transfers some of your PR to the links destination.

• You can’t give away PR you don’t have. If your website is a PR0, outbound links on your site are pretty much useless.

• If (A) links to (B), (B) should not link back to (A). This just doesn’t work like it use to, and it’s a waste of PR.

• PR is not everything, but PR is trust, and it directly effects your SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) . Anyone who says “PR doesn’t really matter” is a fool.

• A high PR link from a related site is worth more than hundreds of little to no PR links, keep this in mind.

• PR is URL specific. Just because you are getting a link from a high PR domain, doesn’t mean you are getting much PR from it, keep track of where your links are placed.

• Stay away form the “nofollow” tag. This blacks any and all transfer of PR. This was initially designed for spammers on blog comments, but sometimes webmasters will “link” to you with this tag, thinking you won’t check. Make sure you do, and if you come across it kindly ask them to remove it.

See? PageRank is much simpler than people make it out to be.