One of the most important things to understand if you have an interest in developing a successful online business is that this can only be achieved if your website can attract customers. This sounds straight forward, but so many people fail to recognize the crucial importance of this concept and so their business fails at the first hurdle.

The most important aspect of attracting customers online is through the search engines, principally Google. Often, with so many competing websites you might find that being able to rank well in Google can only be achieved if you optimize your website for the search engines.

Historically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) used to mean identifying the key phrases related to your site and the product that people were searching for and then including these keywords as often as possible in the content. This is known as Keyword Density.

However, over time this has become easily manipulated by those looking to create spam sites. These websites include lists of keywords simply to get ranked, but the content provided is not relevant to what the user has searched for.

Search engines such as Google have recognized this as a major problem as the quality of their search results was becoming less relevant and ultimately a waste of time for those using the search engines.

To combat this, a concept known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) has been introduced to provide a better, more relevant list of search results. In simple terms LSI is an algorithm designed to provide more relevant search results. This is done by looking at the overall theme of a website. Instead of looking at the keywords on the site, the search engine will look at the content overall and measure its relevancy to those authority sites that exist already. LSI judges relevancy by grouping words and phrases to get a clearer picture of the content and then a more accurate search result can be returned.

To make this clear, we can use an example. If a user enters the phrase football in to a search engine, for a website to rank under the old system it would just need to include football in the content a lot. Using LSI the search engine scans websites that also uses related themed words. So in this example, soccer, world cup, premier league, etc. are all related words. The search engine will recognize websites with these related words and return them ahead of a site that just uses one keyword repeatedly.

This is important to understand if you are to ensure that your website continues to appear in Google and the other search engines for the correct relevant key phrases.

So in order to do this you need to design your website with LSI in mind. This can be achieved by including long tail keyword phrases within your content. By doing this, the search engines will have a better idea about the relevancy of your website and will return it for the correct search results.

LSI ensures that those sites that create relevant, unique content will rank highly, thus creating a mutually rewarding outcome for all users. Google will be providing the best possible relevant search results for the user who finds what they are looking for and the websites that rank highly will be those that are able to attract more visitors to their websites.

If you can do this you will outrank most of the competition as they will probably not have done any SEO or they will have the website optimized using the old method of ranking.