There's a new system that's shaking up how websites garner search engine ranking. The former quick ways of keyword stuffing, link farming and so on are no longer the best route to go. Latent Semantic Indexing is changing the way searches happen. As a result, this new system is also altering the necessary strategies for getting traffic and ranking.

Latent semantic indexing, is a Google driven creation that's meant to better gauge the content of a web page in relation to the entire site to discover the overall theme. Latent semantic indexing is a more sophisticated measure of what sites and their pages are all about. While it doesn't mean webmasters need to completely retool all of their keyword optimization efforts, it does mean depth needs to be a greater consideration.

Latent semantic indexing is an advancement of Google's designed to push it towards its mission to make its search results more relevant. The company has always stated it wanted to provide high quality, relevant results. Latent semantic indexing is meant to help make this happen. While Google's original system scanned pages for relevancy in regard to keywords, it also put a very heavy reliance on incoming links. The system overlooked sites that were new or had too much content added too quickly. Unfortunately, in the process of trying to weed out sites that were loaded with keyword stuffed, nonsensical content, the system overlooked good ones, too.

The old way wasn't working, so Google sought out to fix it. Latent semantic indexing was the answer. While a lot of the old measures do matter (i.e. incoming links), they don't as much with latent semantic indexing.

Under latent semantic indexing, sites that want to gain ranking need to make sure they have content that's fresh, updated, keyword rich and relevant. The system is meant to give those who use keyword searches pages that better represent what it is they were looking for instead of those that happen to have bunches of incoming links. All in all, the system is a more fair way of measuring what's on the Internet in regard to relevancy and quality. It also fits Google's mission better.

The time of Google placing most of its focus on incoming links to rank sites is fast becoming a thing of the past. While incoming links still are very important, they aren't as important as they were. They can be used to break "ties" in search results, but depth and theme of pages is more vital.

All of this doesn't mean web publishers need to start over and scrap what they've done in the past. What it does mean is that those who want to fare better with latent semantic indexing need to make sure their content has relevant keywords, is informative and useful and does rely on fluff and keyword stuffing.

The real key to getting ahead with latent semantic indexing is to produce useful pages that follow themes and stick to them. Webmasters that do this will likely rank better on searches. Sites that don't, might have some issues to contend with.

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About the author: Jeff Alderson specializes in boosting traffic and sales. He is also the inventor of numerous PPC and SEO tools. Jeff suggests using a keywords analyzer like Ad Word Analyzer to find keywords for your site. Don't reprint this article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.