Everyone in the search engine marketing industry has funny stories about how they receive spam email offering them SEO services. It happens all the time with some of the most famous people in our industry.

I probably get about one of these a week. Most of them I ignore. But every once in a while one of these jumps out at me.

The one I wanted to talk about today gave a list of their services. They included:

• LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Based SEO
• PPC Management
• Custom, affordable and “Search Engine Friendly” Website Design & Development Service
• Natural Link Building for Improved Online Presence
• Semantic Content Creation: Search Friendly

This amused me because they made a point of using the word “Semantic” twice in their list.

I know why they put LSI, Latent Semantic Indexing, in their list. They did it to impress you.

But I assure you, LSI is nothing more than obvious common sense.

Latent Semantic Indexing is simply the idea that a search engine would look at  a page and, based on the surrounding text, be able to tell what a page is about. So, if the target word is, “Seal”, LSI would allow the search engines to understand if the page is about the Navy Seals, the lovable animal, or Heidi Klum’s husband.

Technically, what is happening here is LSA (latent symantic analysis) by the search engines. They are simply analyzing relationships between words and documents on a web site.

In fact, LSA is done mostly to attempt to weed out spammy pages in their index. Optimizers from long ago would sometimes create the same page 100’s of times and simply change out one or two words. This was an automated strategy and worked for some time.

With LSA, those kinds of pages would easily be targeted. The relationship of words would be off.

All this fancy LSA and LSI talk means is: Optimize your pages for the visitor, not the search engines.

Write pages that are unique and tell a story, while at the same time, focusing on a primary key topic or phrase.

A better, more clear, listing of their services might be:

• Custom content creation around specific phrases

They probably didn’t say that because 1) they likely don’t create custom content (someone who sends spam email likely spams the engines too) and 2) it doesn’t sound nearly as impressive (even though it’s much more clear).

Please don’t hire a search engine optimization firm from a random email you got. Hire an SEO based on some sort of relationship you have formed. Either get a referal from a friend or spend some time getting to know the SEO.

You will have a much better experience in the long run.

Most recent posts by Sage

• SEM News - Print Is the MySpace of Marketing - March 15, 2010 - March 15th, 2010
• Your Web Marketing Week In 60 Seconds - March 15th, 2010
• SEM News - Dear Leader Wants Your Link Spam - March 8, 2010 - March 8th, 2010
• SageRock's New Home - February 24th, 2010
• Web Marketing Week In 60 - February 22 - February 22nd, 2010

1. Chaunna Brooke Says:
   March 5th, 2009 at 11:58 pm

   thanks for the tips about hiring a SEO expert. yeah, i will follow your tips. i will hire only the trusted one. more power on your blog. http://www.thesiteflingmafia.com/

2. Sage Says:
   March 6th, 2009 at 5:57 am

   You are welcome Chaunna.

   If we can help further just let us know.

   Take care,
   Sage

3. metafever Says:
   June 24th, 2009 at 10:13 am

   I spend a lot of time reading blogs and I have to say I’m impressed with your posts. It’s refreshing to find a blog that has valuable content such as yours. I’ll be a regular reader from now on, you can count on it.
   Thanks,
   Dennis

4. Sage Says:
   June 24th, 2009 at 10:19 am

   Thanks so much metafever.

   That means a great deal to me. We’ll try to keep the information as fresh and useful as we possibly can.

   Thanks for being a reader.
   Sage