We all know that keyword and keyword phrases are the foundation of the search engine optimization process, but today we will journey into a world beyond the visible keyword universe.

Well let’s face it, the search engines are getting better and better at figuring out relevant and the irrelevant pages, and the bad one are slowly getting weaned out. Search engines use complex algorithms and methods like LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) to determine the relevancy and ranking of the page against the keyword typed by the user. Methods like LSI examine the content of the page as a whole, rather than trying to locate specific keywords placed strategically on the page (which has been prone to manipulation).

This means that search engines do not require an exact match of your keyword phrase to find relevant pages. I am not saying that placing your keyword in the Meta tags, title, description, link text, heading tags and body content is not important for SEO, but rather that SEO experts will soon have to think beyond the standard keyword optimization of pages to achieve desired ranking results.

What this means for your online business is that search engines will determine the relevancy of your page/keyword based on the content of the page as a whole using semantically close words, related words, similar phrases, and the relationships between the words to determine the relevancy and ranking for the page. At the end of the day, it’s anyone’s guess what the search engines will change or do next, but by following certain basic seo principles and good content practices you can safeguard yourself against.

So it’s not just your keyword that’s important, it’s the right combination of all the words in your content that will matter eventually. Keep in mind the simple rule that the content of your page should have the right supporting context to support your keyphrase (s).

While you don’t need to understand in depth the technologies and methodologies used by search engines, you do need to understand what impact they will have on your online business.

So how does this affect your online business? It forces you to write more relevant and more compelling content. This is good for your business because you'll have content that generates more traffic and conversions and it’s good for the search engines because it increases the quality of the content in their indexes.

In your business is visibility in the search engines, targeted traffic and high rankings for your keywords important to you? Then you need to re-evaluate your seo content strategy and its impact on your search marketing goals.