Hi ya, welcome to the forum.

To be honest, SEO Elite is not really a article posting tool, the feature it has in there to post articles is very small, software like article post robot is the tool that you need to do the job.
the 180 seconds is not in SEO Elite, but in APR, it's one of the last tabs from the right.
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).. It looks at the structure of a web page, how the words are put together. In laymen's terms, if you keep repeating a keyword many times and no other related keywords, the page will not be classed as one of a professional nature. So what's referred to as "Power Words", words that you see experts in the field in any niche use.
For instance... let's take this site for instance... a good example of an LSI article.
http://www.asbestos-mesothelioma.com/asbestos-fibers.html
and compare it with this article
http://www.asbestosnews.com/html/asbestos-fibers.html
The latter has no LSI incorporated into it, that's why the first site above ranks higher... Google doesn't use LSI to rank pages, but uses it to determine which page is more informative, professional. The first site has a small page rank (pr 2), the latter site has a pr of 5, with a page or of 3. So PR is not a factor here, but the way in the content is structured. It improves user experience,a user can walk away with a lot of information compared to the latter site.
When you start doing this for all your articles, linking them up, will require less back links.

I'm doing a live example based on it actually in video guide to profits, they'll be uploaded in about a month from now as it's an ongoing excerise.