If you think Education is expensive –
you should try ignorance
As I
promised a couple of weeks ago, I’m going to attempt pull back the shroud of mystery
that is so often associated with highly complex mathematical concepts to a
point that even marketers and Canadians can understand them.
I learned
long ago that sometimes simple concepts the human mind can conceive, turn into
a VERY complicated programs when turning that concept into an actual working
algorithm. If you are not a scientist involved with Information Retrieval,
(IR), then reading the patents and white papers can leave you feeling confused
and intimidated.
So, what I
do is read the text of those white papers and patents, (skipping all the math
formulas and illustrations), read what some others whom I respect say about
those papers, then devise my own testing process derived from I THINK I
understand and try it out. Once I prove to myself that I have the “gist” of the
concept as it applies to what is important to me, (usually organic, relevant
traffic generation), I’m satisfied that
I understand the concept well enough to capitalize and profit from it. It’s not
as hard as some might have you believe.
Today, the
"Dumb It Down" anti seo-SEO Guru will de-mystify:
Latent Semantic Indexing
LSI has been
around for much longer than you’d think. In fact, LSA, (latent semantic
analysis), was patented in 1988. But I became aware of it from a man I was
lucky enough to call a friend. A very smart man and one of those IR scientist
guys I mentioned earlier. He was VERY involved in LSI research and application
and he was the one who helped me understand it at a high level and then apply
it at a low level. In my experience, when you can learn it high and apply it
low, it usually means $.
His name is
Edel Garcia. I haven’t seen him around in a while so I’ve kind of lost touch
with him but he still has a great site covering this and related topics and
while possibly a little dated, it is still very good foundation kind of info.
http://www.miislita.com/information-retrieval-tutorial/svd-lsi-tutorial-4-lsi-how-to-calculations.html
Ok, let’s
get started.
One of my
favorite sites about LSI is http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/lsa_definition.htm
An excerpt from that page that I feel illustrates the concept
pretty well is:
let's say we use LSI to index our
collection of mathematical articles. If the words n-dimensional, manifold and
topology
appear together in enough articles, the search algorithm will notice that the
three terms are semantically close. A search for n-dimensional
manifolds will therefore return a set of articles containing that phrase
(the same result we would get with a regular search), but also articles that
contain just the word topology. The search engine
understands nothing about mathematics, but examining a sufficient number of
documents teaches it that the three terms are related. It then uses that
information to provide an expanded set of results with better recall than a
plain keyword search.
Ignorance is Bliss
Before we discuss the theoretical underpinnings of LSI, it's
worth citing a few actual searches from some sample document collections.
- In
an AP news wire database, a search for Saddam Hussein returns
articles on the Gulf War, UN sanctions, the oil embargo, and documents on
Iraq that do not contain the Iraqi president's name at all.
- Looking
for articles about Tiger Woods in the same database brings up many stories
about the golfer, followed by articles about major golf tournaments that
don't mention his name. Constraining the search to days when no articles were
written about Tiger Woods still brings up stories about golf tournaments
and well-known players.
- In
an image database that uses LSI indexing, a search on Normandy invasion shows
images of the Bayeux tapestry - the famous tapestry depicting the Norman
invasion of England in 1066, the town of Bayeux, followed by photographs
of the English invasion of Normandy in 1944.
In all these cases LSI is 'smart'
enough to see that Saddam Hussein is somehow closely related to Iraq and the
Gulf War, that Tiger Woods plays golf, and that Bayeux has close semantic ties
to invasions and England. As we will see in our exposition, all of these
apparently intelligent connections are artifacts of word use patterns that
already exist in our document collection.
Cool ? Not too long of a stretch to
grasp huh? BUT what does that tell you about how to build your pages so that
you start generating converting traffic from organic results?
I’m going to give you several links
at the end of this post that displays a wide variety of explanations, definitions
and opinions that all give you as much depth and insight into the topic as you
want to dig for. But when you start looking for what all those definitions mean
as it applies to making your competitors suck SERP wind, the list gets pretty
short. That’s what I’m trying to help with.
I’ve read most of them, as painful
as many are, and I can save the majority of readers a lot of time and teeth
grinding. Boiling all the information down into workable solutions is the key
and to do that you don’t need to be a scientist or mathematician. You just have
to use your common sense and realize that all these papers were written too
satisfy some personal agenda of the author and we can all be pretty sure that
agenda had little to do with OUR success.
So, bottom line, what does all the
self serving information tell us as online marketers?
STAY ON MESSAGE!
That’s right. Perhaps millions of
words online describing a pretty basic process and it all comes down to 3 words.
Stay on message.
I understand how difficult it is to
plan out an entire site for the long term. Things change and experience is what
we get when we were expecting something else. So even though I am a big
supporter of planning and developing objectives and strategies, I’m making it
even easier than that. You can do it on a page by page basis and simply spend five
minutes thinking about what the new page is about, what is it’s purpose what
words best serve that purpose and then stay on message.
It is really not that different than
talking to a few people at the same time. If you had the attention of say half
a dozen people for 10 minutes and your objective was to get them to buy a
couple of raffle tickets, you may spend a little time talking about the charity
you were pitching, maybe a little time talking about yourself to establish
trust but the majority of the time you would spend talking about the benefits
of them buying the tickets. Why? So they associate the benefits with the
product. ASSOCIATE. That’s a big word when it comes to LSI.
Assuming someone in the group raised
their hand and asked a question about some other charity? Would you talk about
THAT charity and their benefits? Why would you want to point out the benefits
of a different charity? It would confuse the people you just convinced about
the benefits of YOUR charity.
Would you talk about the other charity
trying to make them look bad? Again, buy talking about them instead of you, you
risk someone disagreeing with you and you lose affinity with them.
So what is the best route? STAY ON
MESSAGE.
It’s the same with web pages and
online content. The only difference is you are not using a vocal medium, you
are using a textual and graphical medium.
So you use the alt tags for graphics
to associate words to serve your purpose. You use heading tags, titles, anchor
text in links both interior and exterior. You think about what words you want
to be put together by the search engine and by the humans reading the words and
STAY ON MESSAGE. If you are talking
about plastic surgery, don’t start talking about plastic car parts. Use medical
terms, use anatomical terms, use common words and phrases that paint a mental picture
of the target topic.
The next page you build you can talk
about anything else you want but on that page, again, talk only about one
thing. Use as many words as you like,(the less words you use to get the message
clear in the readers mind the better BTW), but only talk about that one thing.
That’s it. I could elaborate but
there is really no need. If you don’t understand staying on topic or if you suffer
from ADD or some other affliction that hinders your concentration or focus,
then you should seek professional help, but for the mast vajority of us wanting
to make a buck online, just focus and stay on message.
Peach Y’all
The Anti-seo SEO Guru
References
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis
www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/lsa_definition.htm
lsa.colorado.edu/papers/dp1.LSAintro.pdf
www.freshpatents.com/Scalable-probabilistic-latent-semantic-analysis-dt20071011ptan20070239431.php
Don’t eat your lunch
before you get to school. You won’t have anything to trade for something better
and you’ll go hungry!