Friday, September 4, 2009

Article Writing the Natural Way - With Latent Semantic Indexing

Article writing is incredibly popular at the moment and there are many different article marketing strategies available. The reason is obvious: the search engines are struggling to provide highly relevant search results and a well-written article often fits the bill very well. Unfortunately though, while writing good quality articles can have huge benefits for you -- not least from the search engine love -- it is all too easy to write poor, or outright bad ones.

Writing articles is a skill that can be quickly learned. Think about what your readers are looking for. Are they hoping to learn new information to help with their own research, or are they looking for entertainment? Are you trying to write a guide to help your audience, or are you trying to tease them into clicking a link to learn more - and generating traffic for your website as a result?

Tips articles are very popular and are increasingly being used on blogs because they tend to be shorter and punchier than the longer, report-style ones. Whichever type of article you work on, there is one over-riding concept to keep in mind: latent semantic indexing.

Don't worry about the jargon -- it is quite simple really. All LSI (for short) means is that for any keyword or phrase you choose there are hidden words (that's what latent semantic means) that would naturally be used by someone talking or writing about the subject. Put another way, words that support the core concept.

A couple of years ago, the search engines, in their drive to present higher 'authority' web pages to searchers, realized that many articles that are churned out by article marketers or by writers of private label material tend to be highly focused on a single keyword or phrase. This single-minded focus, to the exclusion of all other words that could be seen as keywords, tends to make the reading experience of such work rather bland. The results read as being quite one-dimensional.

But then, the search engines' linguists came to see that there were articles out there that were much more rounded, much more three-dimensional. Those 3-d ones not only read better, but they also tended to give the search engines' customers a better search result. It became clear that the better articles were using more words and phrases related to the core topic. They were better fleshed out.

From that beginning, LSI was born. Algorithms were created that could analyze a web page or article to see how many of the hidden 'support' words were included and the better the score, the more 'authority' such pages tended to be awarded. Google call this 'concept identification' and have talked about how important it is to them on their official blog.

So, as writers, how do we know which words to include? After all, Google and it's competitors might like to use LSI or concept identification, but they don't want to make it easy on us -- they don't divulge their secrets. Until recently, you had to use guesswork, but now there is software available that can analyze any given topic or niche and work out which words tend to appear on the pages that are ranked the highest: in theory, the Internet's top quality authority pages.

Armed with a list of the most important words from the top 50 pages for any niche search, we can plan our article, from the word go, to be balanced and well rounded. Exactly as the SEs like.

Before I started writing this article, for example, I plugged 'article writing' in to my LSI research tool and was given a list of 45 support words and phrases, along with their frequency of use. With that list in mind it has been easy to weave a generous selection of them into what I've written in a natural, unforced way.

By using software that has been specifically developed to do the latent semantic analysis for you in seconds, you sanve a huge amount of time and effort. Such programs also do a whole lot more -- typically reporting a huge array of on-page SEO factors. You also discover the keywords and phrases that have helped the 50 top-ranked pages for ANY key phrase you enter rank well for.

When you uncover the words that the search engines really want to read in your articles and on your webpages, your article writing will never be the same again. It will jump off the page in three wonderful, multicolored dimensions.

Try out the original, and best LSI research tool, Keyword LSI Spy, for yourself absolutely free. http://www.keywordlsispy.com Get 3 free trials of Keyword LSI Spy here.

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