When writing content for the web, it’s easy to get caught up in all things SEO. We do keyword research, we look for expensive keywords, and we spend time researching content to make sure our time produces earnings. But more and more, search engines are turning to a technique called Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI to rank webe content. It’s one technique you don’t want to overlook.
With SEO, we try to use a specific keyword or phrase enough so that it makes up about 2-4% of the words in our articles (give or take, the jury seems to always disagree on what is best). Doing so helps the search engines find our content, understand that what it is about, and rank it accordingly.
But consumers are smart, and so are search engines. They don’t want content that is just written for ranking in search. They want content that is informational and actually useful. This is where LSI comes into play. Instead of just looking for the main keyword or keyword phrase, search engines are now looking for terms that seem to be related to the keyword phrase.
For example, if you are writing an article about wedding attire, and your keyword phrase is “bridal accessories,” the search engine is going to look for things that go along with “bridal accessories” to judge just how thorough and valuable the content is. So in our example, words like “veil,” “garter,” and “bridal bouquet” would be pulled out and boost the ranking of the article.
LSI is important because search engines are always evolving. People are always trying to get more from the web content. And to be realistic, as the amount of content on the web grows, the quality must also grow in order to stay competitive. Only the best content will end up near the top, and that requires paying constant attention to new search engine techniques, such as LSI.
