The New SEO - Content Centric Search & LSI

Posted by Myles Golden on Feb 6, 2017

Google’s search rankings algorithms are evolving faster than ever before. In order to keep up with it, SEO techniques need to evolve too. SEO is becoming much more content centric than ever before. Site owners need to understand content centric search in order to keep their websites high on the search rankings.

Search engines are constantly trying to improve user experience; that is, to make it easy for people to be able to find and access quality content. Content centric search helps them do this; therefore, understanding how it works is essential for good SEO that will keep traffic coming to your site. Getting your site high on the search rankings—and keeping it there—is the objective of SEO, but don’t forget that the way to achieve this isn’t by cheating the system. It’s best accomplished by doing what you’ve always done—pleasing your customers—past, present, and future!

Why Should I Care About Content Centric Search?

• To keep your website high in the search rankings, your site needs to be content centric search friendly.
• Blackhat strategies will no longer work to boost your search rankings
• Google’s latest algorithm updates will penalize sites using blackhat SEO techniques
• Google has new penalties for sites that lack quality content
• Search rankings are based on quality of content (content centric search)
• A quality website will leave all of your site visitors with a positive impression of your company

How Can I Use SEO To Make My Site Content Centric Search Friendly?

• Make sure your site has great content that your site visitors want
• Think about your site from a customer’s perspective
• Are you answering their questions? Providing them with useful information?
• Do the links on your site connect to more useful, relevant information?
• Does your User Interface play a role in how your content is displayed in a readable format?

Here's Some Specifics:

Go through your entire site, and make sure that each page is quality. Remember that to attract links, you need content that is worth linking to. Keep in mind that site visitors are becoming more sophisticated as well as the search engines. Don’t try to fool them with short posts and keyword stuffing.

Content Centric Search -- Content Factoring

For great SEO you should understand how Google decides on the search rankings. It uses “content factoring”. This means that if half of your site’s pages have great content, but half of them don’t—all of your site’s pages will be averaged together to determine the overall quality of your site. Your pages of poor quality content will actually drag down the search rankings of your whole site. To avoid this pitfall of content centric search, eliminate or rewrite any low quality pages you may have on your site. This will help you more than simply adding more high quality pages to try and cover up the low quality pages. If you do this, not only will your search rankings improve, but your site visitors will be more appreciative of your site.

What's Great SEO Content?

Great content is valuable, compelling, and web-friendly. It’s what you would want to see as a site visitor on a site high on the search rankings. Don’t think about SEO exclusively; think about your target audience too. Great SEO puts their needs first, and the search engine bots’ second.

I THINK MY SITE IS WRITTEN WITH GREAT SEO TECHNIQUES, BUT IT STILL HAS LOW SEARCH RANKINGS

Content Centric Search Quality

People who write their own sites have a limited perspective on the quality of their content. It’s best for someone other than the primary writer to evaluate a site to determine the value of its content. Another problem often encountered in SEO by people writing their own sites, is that what they thought they wrote is not what is actually being communicated through the site. This is the kind of error that the content centric search engines will pick up on, since they evaluate millions of sites on any given topic. If your site doesn’t fit in with the other sites of similar content, this will negatively affect the search rankings.

Content Centric Search Style

Another issue people encounter when they are writing their sites without the help of an SEO professional is the style it’s written in. A content centric search not only checks for what the content is, but also for how it’s written. A site needs to be written with the same vocabulary that its target market would use. Google’s search engines know what that is because of the sheer volume of sites they evaluate. This is why it's important to understand how SEO and semantic search work together. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) will give you content that extra "umphf" that it needs. A site owner however, would have to research the target audience as well as other websites that target the same market. This can be hard to do if you’re not an SEO writing professional.

In order to get the best results, engage the help of an SEO professional, and keep in mind that content centric search is really all about keeping your target audience in mind. If you follow the above guidelines, your search rankings are bound to improve.

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