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Free, open & non-commercial. SEOmoz is a search engine optimization resource created to benefit the entire SEO community. Every tool, service & product provided is absolutely free to all users.

The site contains 4 major sections:

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Despite the possible duplicate content penalty, I'm going to reproduce (yes, word for word) a post I made earlier today on SEW to try to clear up some confusion about the relationship and meaning of LSI/LSA vs. Theming.

LSA - Latent Semantic Analysis
The idea behind this is that by taking a huge composite (index) of millions of web pages, the search engines can "learn" which words are related and which noun concepts relate to one another.

For example, using LSA, a search engine would recognize that trips to the zoo often include viewing wildlife and animals, possibly as part of a tour.

Now, conduct a search at Google for ~zoo ~trips. Note the bolded words match the terms I italicized in the paragraph above. Google is bolding 'related' terms and recognizing which terms that frequently occur concurrently (together / on the same page / in close proximity) in their index.

Some forms of LSA are too computationally expensive. For example, Google isn't smart enough to 'learn' the way some of the newer learning computers do at MIT (see some news reports on this). They cannot, for example, learn through their index that Zebras and Tigers are both examples of striped animals, although they may realize that stripes and zebra are more semanticly connected then ducks and stripes.

Theming
Theming is more of an SEO concocted subject that is floated around often - choosing a 'themed' page for a link rather than a non-themed page. Basically, theming is what Google bought the company Kaltix for. They created the site-themed (flavored) search for Google, which is able to categorize many websites, based on their content/links/etc. into varying themes through a categorization structure.

Every request that comes into Google's search is sent to a specific datacenter where the results are returned. As of today, there are more than 50 unique IP addresses known to the SEO world that are returning slight variations of search results. Although many ponder the reason for this, clearly it is something that has been a part of Google's search technology and has no reason to dissappear in the near future.

However, Google's use of datacenters can sometimes give away changes that may be about to happen in the search results before they are found worldwide. Many SEOs monitor the datacenters daily, and SEOmoz is no different (just see our rank check tool - allowing users to search 30+ datacenters at a time). Lately there have been several uproars at the forums over different results from specific datacenters and their chances of propogating to the Google search network as a whole.

Google has certainly done this in the past - making slight alterations and testing them out at a public datacenter, then shifting the algorithm changes over to the entire system. One good way to see if the results are likely to propogate is to wait for more than one datacenter to change to the new results. If you can find 2, 3 or more datacenters shifting to a new set of SERPs, chances are good that the change could become permanent. Remember, if you do see these changes, please report them.

As Google, Yahoo! & the major engines dive into rich media and alternative data sources (news, video, images, etc.), it's important for SEOs to keep on top of the changes and how best to optimize for them. Image searches are already a great source of traffic for sites that offer them and hosting your own image content on your site can bring in extra traffic, particularly if you're serving the types of pages & images that image searchers are seeking.

Currently, there aren't any web tools for seeing the number or kinds of image searches that are being done, but common sense can help, just as it did before Overture & Wordtracker existed. Think about the content you serve and imagine related search terms that would yield images - think along the lines of searchers seeking images for:

• School projects, reports or presentations
• Diagrams for use on their own websites or in papers
• Artistic photography for use in creative media or to Photoshop
• Images of famous/notable persons/places/things
• Photos of a region or specific landmark

If your site can serve these, make sure to link your images to a page on the subject and provide alt tags. Also, serving the same image on multiple pages (if appropriate) can lend additional credit in image searches. Don't forget, too, that Google offers image search by size, and often ranks by size as well, so if you have high-res copies, offering them somewhere on your site can be helpful.