What are LSI Keywords?
Explaining What is LSI And How To Rank With It
Latent Semantic Indexing is a newer computer-driven method in which applications such as search engines use a mathematical algorithm that removes unimportant words (as, is, the, to, my etc) and compares only the most important words in your web page content to other web pages to determine their similarity.
What makes it so important to search engines is that it helps them index your page properly to recommend it to the right web visitors. Here’s an example of how this works:
If your blog post was about dinner plates, then it is likely the keyword “plates” will be used quite often on that page. The issue is that the word “plates” has many different meanings. A human reader would know exactly what type of plates your blog post is about by reading the content on that page, however a search engine isn’t as smart.
“LSI is the single most overlooked aspect in on-page SEO”
——————————————————————————————————————————
——————————————————————————————————————————
“We Look the Same – But there’s NO Relation”
Try searching for “plates” in the Google Keyword Tool. It will bring up all sorts of unrelated phrases.
Without Latent Semantic Indexing, your blog post could be indexed for plate boundaries, corelle plates, license plates, boiler plates, collector plates, and countless of other unrelated meanings for the word “plates”.
In the past, older search engines would often make these mistakes so LSI was developed to find the meaning of your web page content from it’s semantics.
Latent Semantic Indexing works like this:
- Latent – The LSI process is applied after your web page has been crawled for its keywords
- Semantic – During the 2nd pass, the crawlers don’t look for keywords. This time they look for the semantic meaning of your content based on how your keywords relate with the content.
- Indexing – The search engines index your web page in the results pages (or SERPs) for the right meaning
So if your blog post about plates often mentions food-related words such as steak, forks, knives, etc then it will index you for “dinner plates”.
If your blog post about plates often mentions words such as licenses, registrations, motor vehicles then it will index you for “license plates”.
What Does This Mean to Me?
How this affects you as a website owner is that you no longer can simply optimize your site with onpage SEO using your primary keyword terms. Nope. The websites that make it to the top spots on Google now must use both SEO keyword research and a second layer of keyword research (LSI) by placing related terms with the webpage content .
People want better search results and Google is bent on giving it to them. The search engines now understand that if you have a page of content on “dog training”, merely repeating the word “dog training” over and over is not going to make the grade for “quality content”. In fact, it will be penalized for keyword stuffing.
Double Your Traffic with LSI Keyword Content
Here’s how the web pages on the first page of Google not only rank high, but increase their traffic by double, triple or more. Let’s use the keyword “dog training” as an example.
A naturally written article on dog training would likely contain similar, semantically related keywords as shown below.
“Dog Training” related keywords:
- in home dog training
- dog training tips
- dog behavior
- obedience dog training
- dog training techniques
By including all of these keywords, search engines are satisfied in knowing that your page is high quality content on the subject of dog training and is more confident in recommending your web page to those searching for the keyword “dog training”.
If you want your web pages and blog posts to rank high in the search engines then you absolutely must use LSI keywords within your content to increase your authority in your niche. Not only does it help rank for the primary keyword, but also the LSI keywords which effectively doubles your traffic.
How to Do LSI Keyword Research
If you want to add the most relevant LSI keywords to your content on-the-fly as you create it, then you are going to need a product with an LSI keyword tool incorporated into it. There are a few high-quality plugins for WordPress that handle this task extremely well and help to drastically increase search engine rankings for your web page content.
If your goal is to rank every page on your website and not just your homepage high in the search engines then you should consider looking at an LSI keyword tool
See a side-by-side comparison of the best LSI Keyword Tools within the » Best SEO Plugins
