How many sales do you lose through poor SEO
Attempting to promote your website online, often against stifling competition, can seem an impossible prospect especially if you only have limited knowledge of the techniques required. Learn what it takes to get to the top.
Search Engines and Latent Semantic Indexing
In the last unit of the course, we offered a basic overview of how search engines work. In this unit, we are going to take a more in-depth look at search technology, explaining some of the innovations that have been made to help return relevant results for search queries. In particular, we will be looking at some of the factors involved in Latent Semantic Indexing (or LSI for short).
Because of its very nature, beginners may find the material in this unit quite advanced, so you are encouraged to take your time and try to absorb the main points. We have also provided footnotes and suggestions for further reading. You are not required to read this material, but more advanced webmasters may find some of the sources mentioned useful.
By the end of this unit you should be able to:
- understand the basics of Latent Semantic Indexing
- understand how a search engine sees documents
- understand how a search engine weights keywords
This unit assumes that you have read the previous parts of the course and are familiar with major search engines such as Google.
3.1 Another look at search engines
SEO requires quite a lot of background knowledge if you are going to optimise your page in a manner that is effective and does not actually damage the ranking of your website. Before you even get your hands dirty altering the code on your web pages, you need to do quite a bit of research into the most effective keywords to use for your product or services and into the competition you face in search engine rankings. However, even prior to this, however, it is necessary that you understand a bit about
- search engines
- the individual searcher
In one sense, these can be considered the ‘rocks’ upon which effective SEO is founded. After all, SEO is about improving your search engine visibility in order to bring targeted traffic to your site, and this implicitly involves understanding the nature of both search engines and the average searcher. Knowledge of these areas will prove an immense help when you come to optimising your own pages.
The two areas are inter-related: after all, the function of a search engine is not to search documents per se, but to search documents in a way that satisfies the needs of the average searcher. In order to maintain trust, the search engine must continue to provide the user with reliable and relevant results for search queries. In this context, any innovations made in search engine algorithms can be considered, first and foremost, as refinements aimed at providing ever more relevant results for the searcher.
We will now look at some of the advanced techniques that search engines are beginning to employ in order to satisfy the needs of the searcher.
For more information about our Search Engine Optimisation Training Courses contact Syllabus or call +34 693 475 142.