The concept of six degrees of separation is a commonly understood one.  Pretty much everyone can be connected to anyone through six or less people.  I have a friend in LA, that friend has a friend who is a writer in Hollywood, that write knows an agent, that agent knows Jessica Alba.  So theoretically I could start dating Jessica Alba next week .  Enough about Jessica Alba and moving onto more important things like how does this concept make us money.

Think about keywords using the degrees of separation when you are creating content.   If I was to make a site about “Matt Cutts” I would want to include related keywords.  A good list of related keywords will make you know what the page is about without even being told.  If I made a list of related keywords and wrote on it Google, engineer, interviews, speaker, video and spam you would think Matt Cutts.  That is what a good list of related keywords does, it makes you know what the page is about without even being told.

For each one of those major related keywords it would be smart for me to create a subpage on my Matt Cutts website.  Each of these subpages should also contain good related keywords in their content.  My “google” page would have a list of keywords like engineer, sandbox, googleguy, update, optimization and google dance.  Those words are all about Matt and Google.

How do you figure out these related keywords?  Related keywords is the simple way of saying LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).  Don’t get scared because I mentioned LSI.  Think back to my examples.  The related keywords are simple and that is what LSI is all about.  Using a list of related keywords to figure what a page is truly about. 

Related keywords or LSI or whatever you want to call it does not only impact content.  It also impacts your links.  Specificially it impacts what is your anchor text, how varied is it and what words is it varied amongst.  Search engines are moving towards looking for related keywords in your anchor text.  Be smart and build the right links with the appropriately varied anchor text.

These lists of related keywords are not really six degrees but it is the concept of building content or anchor text with related keywords that are themed that is important.   As search engines become more complex you should also become more complex with your efforts.