SEO A to Z - part 14 - "Link Profile to LSI Keywords"

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Speaker 1: 0:26

Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard, and we're on to part 14 of our SEO A to Z. Today we're going to go from link profile to LSI keywords. So last week we ended on link juice, which is a bit of a contentious term for some people, and LSI keywords is another one. So don't judge me just by having that in the title. We've got to talk about all the all of the keywords, all the items on the SEO A to Z, even the ones that people seem contentious. So anyway, let's get started with link profile. So link profile is another term for backlink profile, which we talked about back in probably part one, no part two of the seo. It said a link profile is just all the accumulated backlinks and links pointing to a web page or a website is known as the link profile. So if people are analyzing, um, all the links that a website or web page has, they'll talk. They'll talk about the link profile that page or site has. So, yeah, it's just a term for a collection of all the links pointing to a resource or a set of resources.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Next, we've got link selling. So link selling is the practice of placing outbound followed links on your site to third-party sites in return for payment. So the payment doesn't have to be in cash, but it can also be in kind, such as free products or services. And sometimes websites are created solely for the purpose of selling links. So these are things called private blog networks quite often. Yeah, so someone will set up a website and purely for the purpose of selling links to other people. Often they are, you know, by old domains that have got a previous backlit profile. Go back to Blink profiles we just talked about. They've got their own backlit profile from when they had a previous website on them and then that website's done and gone. People will buy those domain names when they expire and create a new website on them solely for the purpose of selling links to other people.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Now, link selling done like this with the purpose of selling links to other people. Now, link selling done like this with the purpose of manipulating search rankings, google consider this to be spam and therefore against their terms of service. So you know, link selling can be considered a black hat technique. So if google decide that you are selling links from your website, then they are going to penalize your website. You know they might penalize you just by removing you from the links altogether, by rankings you might have.

Speaker 1: 2:46

I mean people who've created sites just for the sole purpose of selling links like this. When those sites gets burned, they don't care, they're just creating you on start selling links again. If you are a genuine site with a genuine purpose you've created a website for for a genuine purpose. That's, um, something that someone say comes along and says to you hey, can I buy a link on your website, and you go oh yeah, I'll sell you a link. And someone else comes oh yeah, I'll sell you a link and you start doing it on the side. You risk burning a genuine site which has another real purpose. So that's why I think you should be very careful for choosing to sell links on a site that you own for another purpose because, yeah, you just don't want to get your site burnt down if you sell links, but if you want to, your choice. But just appreciate those risks.

Speaker 1: 3:35

Next up we've got link spam. So link spam is the use of links to try to manipulate Google search rankings. So what Google would define as a spam link is not universally agreed on, but Google may see any link as link spam if it was placed with the aim of increasing rankings. Link spam might also include any mass use of any service or website that allows users to generate and place their own links, such as directories, forums, blog comments, whether paid or not. So this sort of goes in with link selling, link buying, all these things. If you are, if you are manipulating links in a way to try and manipulate uh rankings, then google can consider this as link spam. Um, but I say yeah, the most um sort of traditional ones are things like blog comments spam, forum spam, directory spam, just creating links anywhere you can, especially if it's automated. Uh yeah, link spam bad as far as google is concerned. So lots of people used it back in the day, including myself. We got penalized for it, so don't do any more. Make your own choices.

Speaker 1: 4:36

Next we've got llm, or large language model. So a large language model, or an llm, is a system that's trained on a large language model, or an LLM is a system that's trained on a large collection of data, usually crawled from the web or other open sources such as free books. Llms are parts of AI systems that can take and understand human input requests and then return a generated response based on repeatedly predicting the next word to respond with. Now, the output from LLM can look very impressive at first glance. However, at the time that we're recording this, they still have the tendency to elucidate facts, so any ai response needs to be fact checked. So, like um, an obvious llm that most people have heard of will be chat gpt. That's the most famous large language model at the moment. There are others like google, gemini, um, so I'm sure you're if you've been hiding under a rock, you will know what an llm is.

Speaker 1: 5:28

Now. Obviously, the use of llms for creating content for your website looks appealing to start with, but just be really, really careful if you do this. Google's clearly not very happy with the idea of having their index filled with um lots of automatically generated content, especially with the fact that the moment there are drawbacks in terms of the limitations that these elements have in terms of hallucinating facts. We've seen loads of examples of those, so just be careful if you're using them. And we're LLM, large language model. That's what stands for.

Speaker 1: 6:00

Next, we've got local business schema. So Local business schema is a structured data schema for local businesses that Google can understand and incorporate into the search results page. So this is where you put this information on your website, following the schema markup protocol for local business schema, and Google can machine read that. It can understand what you're telling it and it can then help incorporate that into its search results page. So if you've got a local business, it's worth investigating this and get it on your site so that Google can get the facts right about you.

Speaker 1: 6:33

Next, we've got local map pack. So the local map pack sometimes this is just abbreviated to the local pack is a search feature that can trigger when Google determines that your intent is to find local businesses or locations, and the map pack includes relevant local business listings, such as restaurants if you're searching for restaurants in an area and a map with the location pins dropped. So you're obviously um. You'll have seen this come up many times when you, if you use google, you want to make sure if you are a local business with a local area that you get included in the local map pack. You want to do things like looking into the Google business profile to get all those details in, and we just spoke about the local business schema. That's another ideal way of getting you in these local map packs if you are a relevant business for these kind of queries.

Speaker 1: 7:25

Next, we've got local SEO. Now. Local SEO this is the SEO where it's a strategy around about getting the most visibility possible in local search features in Google, such as a local map pack, which I spoke about, when your business has a physical location it serves or serves from. So it's like a niche area of SEO and some people specialize just purely in local SEO and making sure that people appear for those local searches if they are local type businesses. So it's likely just like a niche area, like a subset of SEO. So if you see people talk about local SEO, they're just talking about specific SEO tactics and strategies for local businesses.

Speaker 1: 8:06

Next we have Log File Analyzer. So a Log File Analyzer is a software tool that allows you to upload your raw server log files from your web server and gain insights, such as how often search engines and other bots are interacting with your site, how to find broken links and redirect chains. So, if you're not aware, basically the servers that serve your websites, they log every single interaction they get from any kind of service that's requesting pages or resources from that web server. So this will actually record interactions from things that won't show up in many analytics packages. Most analytics packages will really only concentrate on real users using them, whereas you'll find there's all sorts of other services that come along and will try and read from your website, including Google, googlebot, bingbot, bots from other search engines, bots from SEO tools, bots from all sorts of places that come along, and you can find information in that log file that you can't find in analytics, especially things like redirect chains.

Speaker 1: 9:12

Now, a redirect chain is where, if you redirect a page from an old page to a new page, you might then redirect that new page to another page and you end up with redirects following redirects, following redirects, and after so many redirects, google will say we're not following this anymore. I think it might be seven, it's either three or seven. I should have checked this before I recorded. But after a certain number, google will say we're not following this anymore and you don't want long redirect trains because it slows people down and eventually Google won't pass link equity through it. So a log file analyzer will help you spot things like that. It'll help you find broken links, where, if a website's linking into your website and to a page that no longer exists, you might not know that that's happening, whereas a log file analyzer software will be able to see that being flagged by the web server software in its logs. So useful things there, especially if you've got a big old site.

Speaker 1: 10:03

Next up, we've got long tail. Now the long tail is a term that describes keyword phrases that are low volume. Now these are attractive to build content for as they tend to be low competition. So they give you a good chance to start ranking new content, especially for new sites. Now they're called long tail because if you look at a graph of keywords to search volume, it shows a very long tail of keywords with low search volume. Somewhere in the region of 80% of all search queries can be considered long tail. So the vast majority of people's searches are in the long tail. So there's a lot that you can do there, especially if you're a new site.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Targeting the long tail is a really good tactic because there's so much less competition there. You start targeting head terms like credit cards, where you know there's lots of search volume. On the term credit card, you've got a lot of competition because the site's been ranking there for a long time huge sites, lots of link equity, lots of authority. It's going to be really hard to rank for the term credit card. But if you go into the long tail and do something very specific around credit cards for art students studying in a particular university, then you you know you've got much more chance of ranking on that. Okay, you're going to get less traffic, but you're going to start ranking and you need to start ranking to start building your website up. So the long tail is where to start for most people.

Speaker 1: 11:25

Okay, and finally we get to the contentious one lsi keywords. So lsi stands for latent semantic indexing, which, if we look at the history of it, this was a patent that was filed by Bell Laboratories, which expired in 2008. It was created this was filed in the 1980s, before sort of the World Wide Web, the internet as we know it by Bell Laboratories, and it was all about how words are semantically related to each other. So, for example, chilies and India are semantically related to the word curry, because chilies are in curry. India is where the sort of the country most associated with curries.

Speaker 1: 12:05

Now, google have always said they don't use latent semantic indexing, and that's probably true because it was under patent till 2008. So if they'd used latent semantic indexing, as described in the patent, then they would have been violating that patent. That's not to say they don't use the concept of semantics, which they do. So the concept of semantics is that, you know, content is not just keyword phrase specific, but it covers a topic with natural language and topical relevance. So this means that Google can work with synonyms rather than relying on exact keyword matches when choosing which pages to rank for a query. So the long and the short of it is, if you hear someone talk about LSI keywords, they're probably really talking about semantic keywords and semantic SEO, which is valid, but they're just using a term that that kind of got picked up several years ago from a patent that Google doesn't actually use. But Google does use similar concepts, especially since hummingbird came out in 2013. But we'll talk more about semantic keywords and semantic seo when we get to the s's in the a to z. So that's it for today.

Speaker 1: 13:17

Um, hope you found it useful. If there's any l's that you think we're missing from um this episode, or if there's any terms from any other episodes, do get in touch. We'll get them added. We'll do a clear up episode at the end with all the ones we've missed and, yeah, look forward to see you next time. Before I go, I just want to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at keywords people use that, you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I'll show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

Speaker 1: 14:08

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at KeywordsPeopleUsecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people use dot com. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.