In April (2010), I wrote an article for EzineArticles.com on Keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) because the concept was new to me and many of the definitions I had found were too dense to understand easily.
The concept is one that everyone needs to know if they are to use keywords properly and to optimum effect.
Simply put it means inserting into the content, not just the specific niche keywords, but phrases or words that are related to them – even if not specifically including the actual keyword used in the page title (niche keyword).
Be Natural When Writing
To some extent, this will occur naturally as you write, because you will use plurals and synonyms as a matter of course usually.
The related terms (LSI) should be seeded throughout the article (webpage or blog). They can take the form of descriptive adjectives placed in front of the keyword (e.g. if your page is for selling cars, then terms like family saloons, two door convertibles, SUV’s, used automobiles can be used as they are semantically related.
(Semantic simply means an adjective relating to meaning in language or logic.)
It really reflects the ways people search – potential car buyers are not all going to type in “cars for sale” – most will be more specific – looking for types and so on. In other words it is more than just a broad search or pluralizing your keywords.
When the search engines see the word apple, they have to figure out if it’s the fruit or the computer so when your site also refers to computers or microsoft and so on they will know it’s not from a tree! This also empasises the use of using upper case (capitilization) – “Apple” would almost certainly tell a search engine that you mean the company not an orchard.
Avoiding Keyword Stuffing
Using LSI is also a way to avoid keyword stuffing – you will use LSI to insert terms that relate and expand the information about your keyword topic, without over-repeating the keyword itself. If, for example, your site is on “weight loss”, then terms like natural weight loss, exercise, balanced diet, low calorie diets, protein diets will expand the information as they relate to, if not be specific about the keyword “weight loss”.
In this particular article, it is difficult to come up with LSI – as the focus is so narrow – yet if I include words or phrases like “significant words to be indexed” , “search engine retrieval words” cipher words for search engines, then I would be using LSI here on this page – but for our exercise, it would only be confusing.
That is, I am not trying to get this page ranked so much as simply wanting to share the concept.
LSI assists Google and pals correctly categorize your content and place a value on them – which is then reflected in the page ranks.
One way to find related words is to use Google’s adwords tool – type in a few variations that you can think of and then see what comes up – there will usually be quite a few they bring up that you haven’t thought about.
Keywords and latent semantic indexing becomes second nature to you after a while and the more you write, then the more naturally occuring the inclusion of LSI will be.
