Creating Authority Search engines do not understand about 99% of the websites on the Web because they are not deemed to be relevant for content. Millions of sites are considered irrelevant; however, yours should not be one of them. Content must relate to your site. If your site is about basketball, then it is important to clearly define whether the basketball refers to College or Pro basketball, is it coaching, players, stats, or just collectables. If the only keyword emphasized on your website is basketball, it will be difficult for search engines to provide consistent results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a search is performed. Your basketball website will come up along with the 240,000,000 sites on basketball, so you must be more specific. A complex algorithm known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a technology used by search engines to identify not only the keywords on your website and the positioning of those keywords but also other related words that should commonly appear with your keywords or keyword phrases. Algorithms like LSI have come into being because of the pure number of websites on the Internet that simply throw up a website with just their keywords listed and no other content. LSI takes into consideration additional related content that would naturally show up if the content is relevant to the keyword or keyword phrase and is appropriate to the theme. LSI takes a holistic look at the page and the content. If your website does not show up in the top 25 to 35 results of your search query, you can bet that search engines did not find your website to be relevant or an authority on the topic you have chosen for your website’s theme. There are other factors involving the creation of authority, but it all starts with keywords and content related to those keywords within your site. How do we find out what the LSI technology considers important? What related content should appear along with your keywords to give your page weight and relevance? Google has a nifty tool, put a keyword into the search box with a tilde (~) in front of the keyword. The SERP will show up with all the words that Google thinks are relevant to this keyword in bold. Put ~meditation tool in the search box and the resulting bolded words are: meditation tool, tool, techniques, relaxation tools, tools, Yoga tools, relaxation tool, and spiritual on the first 3 pages. The lesson here is that if you want a website that offers a meditation tool to place well in the SERP, you will want to include some of these other related words and phrases within the content of your page. This technique will give you a great start to achieving a website that is relevant and an authority by search engines once they know you exist. While it is important to drive traffic to your website, it is equally important that once traffic arrives at your website, the viewer finds content of value. And the most important visitors your website will ever host are Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the Big Three. Looking back at the past SEO SOS lessons, remember, content is not English 101, but Marketing 101. You can create a site that delivers your message without ignoring LSI that places you well on the SERP. Copyright ©2008 TAO Consultants, Inc. All rights reserved. _____________________________ Chesa Keane has been designing and developing web sites with an eye toward search engine optimization and traffic generation since 1995. TAO Consultants offers online web and SEO courses to help you make the most of your web business and investment at the www.computergoddess.com website.