Is SEO Really Worth the Effort!

Latent Semantic Indexing is all the talk now among Webmasters trying to keep up with the ever-changing Google indexing for sites.

First of all what is Latent Semantic Indexing? Well it is a complex mathematical formula, but it is being used by search engines to help them determine what is the theme of the site.

It is now known that Google especially are giving more importance to websites that are closely themed, and this can be very effective for achieving a good position in search engine results.

With the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN seemingly changing their algorithms on a regular basis, it sometimes feels like you’re fighting a losing battle trying to keep up with them. We’re all constantly tweaking our websites and chasing links in a desperate attempt to grab, or hold on to, that elusive spot on the first page of results for our chosen keywords, so is SEO really worth the effort?

Well firstly if you have optimized your site well, both through onpage and offpage optimization, and manage to obtain top rankings in the search engines, then you can get a great deal of free traffic to your site, depending on how popular your keywords are that you are ranking well for. So yes of course in this instance SEO is most definitely worth spending time over.

The problem, however, is that if you are launching a new site and plan to get the bulk of your traffic from search engines, you may end up being disappointed because it can take many months before you even get close to achieving high rankings. This is particularly true of Google and Yahoo. MSN is easier to rank highly for, but this is negated by the fact that a lot less people use MSN than Google and Yahoo.

This is why when I now launch a new site I’m focused more on receiving traffic from other sources, and concentrating almost solely on building my own list of subscribers. There are endless ways to start getting immediate traffic to a new site and start building your list.

I personally like to post in forums, write and submit articles to article directories and relevant ezines, pay for advertising in these same ezines, write and submit press releases, promote a squeeze page on traffic exchanges (if my site is related to making money online), credit-based safelists (free safelists are a waste of time) and other list-building services. I also like to write free reports and ebooks (containing links to my site) which can be freely given away (and rebranded for greater distribution) creating a viral effect.

I still carry out the standard onpage search engine optimization techniques, and offpage techniques such as getting keyword-rich text links from directories and other related sites, but I now no longer base my whole future profit model on obtaining top search engine rankings. My thoughts are that if they come they come, but whatever happens as long as I keep building a list of subscribers for each of my sites I know that I can always achieve good profits regardless of where I rank in the search engines.

It also eliminates any stress that can occur when the leading search engines change their algorithms. I’ve seen many instances of long-established websites whose entire livelihood relied on the traffic they received as a result of being at the top of the search engines, but who suddenly saw their sites disappear from the first few pages of results, wiping their profits out almost immediately. Some of these sites had no mailing lists either so they had no alternative profit model in place.

Hopefully you can see that while everyone wants top search engine rankings, it’s not the be all and end all, and certainly shouldn’t be used to base your whole business model on. There are numerous successful websites online who couldn’t care less about SEO, and indeed are nowhere to be found in the search engines. They rely on other traffic-generating techniques, such as viral marketing, joint venturing, or recruiting affiliates, for example, to build and grow their online business.

To conclude, while it’s important to spend some time optimizing your website and obtaining links for SEO purposes, spending several hours a day tweaking every page of your site just to please the search engines is not a productive way to spend your time. Instead you should be focusing on building your list of targeted subscribers, using other more immediate traffic-generating methods where you can see results very quickly, and not have to wait several months before you’re ranking highly in the search engines.

Just keep adding good quality content to your site, and providing a reason for your visitors to return to your site. This should have the effect of boosting your search engine rankings anyway, without having to spend hours on SEO, because other sites will start linking to you automatically, and the search engines will generally reward your site with a higher ranking if it is constantly updated with good content.

In this article I discuss whether it is really worth spending hours on SEO, and examining whether there are other equally important aspects of your online business you should be focusing on.

Google when it visits a web page will not only look at the keywords included on a page, but will look at all the content to see the relevance of the content to the keywords.

This will help search engines to better understand the overall theme of the page.

Assuming you have done some keyword research using one of the keyword tools available, I personally recommend Wordtracker as I find the results more reliable. What is the next step to make website pages more closely themed?

The answer is to try to use as many of the results returned from the keyword tool in your content. This of course needs to be done so that the pages reads well of course.

Using this method, search engines are in no doubt as to the theme of the web page.

Google uses LSI to associate words for classifying pages, as opposed to depending only on the keywords of the past.

Another use of latent semantic indexing is in helping Google in assessing the write type of adsense ads to display on web pages.

To see what words Google thinks are related to a keyword for example, just do a search for any word with the ~ tilde key first. It is possible to get a list from Google of related keywords.

Use their keyword tool, it may provide new words that haven’t been returned by the keyword tool you have used.

A list of results will be returned that Google say are related to your keyword.

Now to get top positions in search engines, it will be important to consider latent semantic indexing because of the close theming of pages will result in higher rankings in search engines.

There is nothing complicated with using latent semantic indexing for your web pages, it is a question of having closely themed sites with content that is related to one theme, so there can be no doubt as to the pages topic.

Another important point to consider is to make sure that you have the anchor text (the words in the hyper links) should vary. It is a good idea to use different words related to your main keyword.

Do not have all the incoming links pointing to one page. By varying the anchor text this will not only get more pages indexed, but will also help with the theming of websites.

For example if your main keyword is seo, you could use anchor text like search engine, search engines, search engine optimization.

First of all what is Latent Semantic Indexing? Well it is a complex mathematical formula, but it is being used by search engines to help them determine what is the theme of the site.



By: Babita Kumari

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SEOPressFormula: A System For Driving Free Traffic From Google, Yahoo & Msn.