Latent Semantic Optimization

There are several ways to increase your search engine ranking, of which back linking is certainly a very important one. Equally important, not to say even more important is to write content which is on topic for the search term you are optimizing for. This is of course a grey area, open for personal interpretations, of what actually can be defined as “the right content” or “the ideal content.”

Search engines have come up with a solution, the same way the human brain is working. As soon as we are born and we start to learn and understand a language we are creating neural bridges between words and word combinations based on the frequency and the related topic we are using them with. We, as Europeans of my generation, will for example automatically think of the words “Coca-Cola”, “Freedom”, “New-York”, “Dollar”, “Ronald Reagan” , “Capitalism”, etc when we think of “America”.

Smart search engines (ie Google) have understood this already a couple of years ago. They have developed models based on Probalistic Latent Semantic Analysis to find out, based on all the content of the internet, what the latent content is for certain topics.

For Example, Google knows exactly what the latent content is for the search term “America” for the search environment “Europeans living in Europe today”. Note: the latent content of “America” will be different for Americans living in North America today. Words like “Hilary” and “Obama” will have a higher latent importance for the Americans then for the Europeans. It goes without saying that Google will rank the content of the web pages that are closest to this ideal content or ContentDNA the highest, depending on the search environment you are in off course.

You could work this process backwards, starting from a search term, and try to find out what the ideal content or contentDNA is, this technique is called Latent Semantic Optimization. Read more on latentsemanticoptimization.com