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SEO Marketing, Semantics, and you.

Published December 16th, 2007

Thanks to guest writer, Chuck Masterson, for this informative article on search engine optimization.

So the question is what’s the real deal with search engine optimization. When you’re looking into Search Engine Optimization for your company or personal website you’re going to have a hard time figuring out what the facts are. You may have heard that there’s lots of dangerous opinions and incorrect advice out there, I’ve come to an interesting conclusion at the end of my SEO search and that is, it really doesn’t matter that much.

That’s not to say that everyone in the world knows what they’re talking about, just that the importance of each particular ranking factor is a lot smaller than people think. And there’s good reason for that. Google has taken into account a huge number of ranking factors, and when somebody discovers one and it utilizes it to its full potential, in some cases it can make a measurable difference.

So what happens is everyone exploits a particular characteristic of the ranking system, and suddenly it becomes less effective. This is not a big surprise. So if you hear somebody suggests something to get better results always consider that at some point there was probably a grain of truth in it. In fact it probably worked very well for somebody.

While doing my keyword research I stumbled across a company that did an extensive background analysis on the Internet and decided which factors were important and to what extent they were important. They came to an amazing conclusion.

The ranking factors were different for each market, and even each keyword!

How’s that for a confusing result. Each keyword has its own unique ranking factors. As a Marketing SEO Consultant myself, I found this both amazing and in hindsight, logical. After all I can understand that ranking well for the term “Internet marketing” is going to be a different process than ranking well for the word “thumbtack”. But if you’re going for the key phrase “ Thumbtacks in San Antonio, Texas”, about the only problem with ranking well for that is getting it down on the page. In fact you can probably Google that exact phrase “thumbtacks in San Antonio, Texas” and I’ll bet just by saying it a second time I have sealed my position for that key phrase. Naturally the ranking factors for that are going to be different than for a highly competitive phrase.

But let’s get back to content business. Healthy Seo optimization means fully informing your visitors on the topic that they’re searching for. When you do cover all the topics for your keyword or your keyword phrase then you’ll accomplish both tasks of informing your visitors properly, and making the search engines happy too. What’s interesting is that the search engines are only as smart as what’s been published already on sites or in articles. You may have heard of something called latent semantic indexing. Let’s cut that down to semantic indexing. Which means the index is created based on the semantics of the language used.

I wrote up an example for a client of mine the other day and told him that “ Log cabins rock!” and I told him if those are the only three words you find on a page, it’s never going to rank well for log cabins. The main reason is that the word “rock” is not a typical descriptor for the phrase “log cabins”. I think you can see that the page with those three words on it, is going to have a hard time when Google tries to place it in the search results. This would be a prime example of a page without LSI keywords in place.

So when the phrase latent semantic indexing comes up again, to think about “Log cabins rock!” at how Google’s going to have a hard time understanding what that page is about. And after going to create a page on log cabins he should be mentioning cedar, Redwood, bark, trees, forests, or whatever words you would normally use to describe a log cabin home. You can go about this research in a number of ways, the simplest being typed in log cabin into your search, and check out the topics covered on the top ranking pages. If you think they’re appropriate put them on your page. Not the exact words, I mean cover those topics and cover them with as much depth as you know about the topic.

Believe it or not that brings us right back to effective SEO services. I have access to software that examines over 100,000 pages of information on at least 200 topics and examines over a thousand possible ranking factors and determines which ones seem to be showing the best correlation between them being there and showing up well on the top 10 rankings.

So now it all boils down to this, the results are in……..if you write up some more on-topic information and put it on your website, it will rank better. That’s it. The biggest factor turned out to be adding more unique content to your website that’s on-topic. So you might wonder why I’m still in business as an SEO consultant. Probably the best reason is, people are shy and don’t like to write.

Chuck Masterson is an SEO consultant, Copywriter, and Wordsmith at CMasterson.com

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