The PLR AdSense Mini-Site (Part 5)
Hah, I bet you thought I wasn't continuing this series, was I? Well, you're wrong, and here's the next installment. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and
Part 4
before continuing. Actually, that's a lie, this part pretty much stands on its own.
Latent Semantic Indexing
So you've got some fresh (hopefully) PLR content to put on your website or blog. Do you just slap it on? If you exclusive rights to the content and you're sure that it's nowhere else on the Web (some quick tests in Google with a few phrases from the text will tell you so) then go ahead. Otherwise, however, be prepared to do a rewrite. Hmm, bet the PLR vendor didn't tell you that, did they? If you're targeting search engine traffic, a rewrite is almost mandatory. The more unique you can make your content, the better.
Now, there are programs out there that will “rewrite” your text, such as the $27 month Secret Article Converter membership. But let's assume you're not going to go that route, that you're skeptical like me and you've decided to sit down at a computer and do the rewriting yourself. So what should you do?
The latest trend in search engine analysis is something called latent semantic indexing or LSI for short. If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of it, I suggest you read the LSI presentation called Patterns in Unstructured Data. But let's just take the high-level view here.
LSI is all about finding relationships between documents based on the concepts rather than on strict keyword matches. Two documents that are talking about the same thing may in fact use different keywords, because there are often many different ways to express the same concepts. LSI tries to determine which keywords are in fact semantically related to each other, making it possible to determine if two documents are actually talking about the same thing.
When I wrote Make Easy Money with Google, I likened to writing content for the Web as “dusting off old skills”. To quote myself:
One of the things you learned in school was how to write essays and reports. You had to research (find, read, and analyze) source documents. You had to form your own thoughts on the topic and put them on paper in logical sequences. You had to check your spelling and your grammar. You had to reference other people's ideas.
Think back to your school days. Do you remember the first time when a teacher told you to go use a thesaurus because he or she was tired of seeing the same words repeated over and over within your text? That's kind of what LSI is all about. Natural human writing tends to vary the wordings of things to avoid repetitive patterns that lose the reader's attention. Two writers writing about the same topic can write texts that are dramatically different, even if the concepts are the same. LSI helps search engines and other text analysis systems find the linguistic patterns that makes writing more “human”. Because if you're writing things for humans, you're not going to repeat keywords over and over again. You're going to find substitutes and synonyms for those keywords. Because if you're writing things for humans, you're not going to repeat keywords over and over again. You're going to find substitutes and synonyms for those keywords. Because … OK, you get the drift.
That's why keyword density isn't the big deal it used to be five years ago. Human-written content tends to have low keyword density when you look at the keywords individually. That's why documents with high keyword density will get flagged as being problematic — it's likely computer-generated or else “optimized” to promote a certain keyword.
Group keywords semantically, however, and things are different.
So when you rewrite any document — PLR or not — try to write things as naturally as you can. Vary the keywords, use synonyms, get the text to flow. Write it for humans. You'll still want to do certain things to make sure the AdSense ads are being targeted correctly — use keywords in the URL, the page title, the meta description, the meta keywords, the headings, the anchor text of links, and of course somewhere in the body a few times — but don't go overboard. Read it out loud and see what it sounds like, if you have to. If you keep hearing the same keywords over and over again — especially long keyphrases like “California loan consolidation” — then take a hard look at what you've written and break out the thesaurus. Or use the AdWords keyword tool to find related keywords.
Yeah, it takes work. Too bad. That's what you have to do to get readers and to get rankings.
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.