Do You Know About Latent Semantic Indexing?

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Semantic Indexing

This mathematical method is used by search engines to combine keywords identified from your website into a list and determine the relationship between the words, terms, and concepts used in the content on a site. The content consists of page titles, headers, subheaders, body text, image attributes and more. Latent semantic indexing or LSI looks for synonyms within the content that are related to the title.

Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you wrote a blog post with the keyword phrase, “Wool Knitting” in the title. Now, within the content are words relating to the title such as knitting needles, yarn, pattern and so forth that relate to the title. LSI determines that this information is relevant to the title and compiles them. That’s why it’s so important to use keywords and synonyms of the keyword within the content on the pages because even though you’re not trying to rank for those words they do boost your ranking in SERPs.

The Importance of Content

The content on your site is very important because it’s what shows the audience and search engines what the site is about. Via LSI the title is collected then compared to the content on the page. The content needs related keywords or synonyms that help the search engine know that the topic of the content matches the title.

Avoiding Keyword Stuffing

It’s tempting when you learn about LSI to add more and more keywords and keyword synonyms to your content but that isn’t really a good thing to do. Yes, make sure to use the keyword in the bullets, headers, subheadings, and content but don’t make it hard to read or confusing trying to add more keywords.

Tips to use LSI in your favor:

Craft Relevant Titles – If you call an article Learn to Play the Piano, the article needs to be about learning to play the piano and not something else. Therefore, you need to be strategic with titles and not clever. Puns don’t work well in the SEO game.

Don’t Overuse Keywords – It’s important to avoid keyword stuffing. If you stuff too many keywords or one keyword too often in the content the search engines will see it as trying to trick the system and it won’t work. Instead, use keywords but keep them at fewer than 2 percent keyword density.

Create High-Quality Content – Don’t spin articles, don’t use low-quality articles, use valuable, informative, engaging, high-quality content that is for your readers not for search engines. Yes, add keywords but don’t make the keyword your total focus.

Check Content for Plagiarism – Use a service like Copyscape.com to check all content you use for plagiarism or duplicate content issues. Even if you write it, check it. That will help you improve your content.

Know What Keywords Work – Use analytics to double check what keywords are getting results on your website or blog. That’s going to help you a lot because it’ll help you come up with new keywords for new content too.

Working related keywords into your content using synonyms and ensuring that the title and content match is important due to LSI if you want your site to rank as an authority site. But, don’t try to force anything. The best course of action is to produce content that your audience wants to read, products that solve their problems, and services that benefit them but keep LSI in mind as you create more content so that your site ranks properly.

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