SalvoMedia

Latent Semantic Indexing is a process by which search engines (Google being confirmed to use it at this point) rank content for keywords other than those that are specifically targeted. If your website is about shoes, for example, you may find that via LSI your website is also ranked for terms such as “flat-top sandals” or “black leather boots”. Writing your content in such a way that it is LSI optimized as a great way to increase search engine rankings and develop even more natural traffic.

The main factors in writing for LSI include:

• Content relevance - Writing content that actually has value to the reader is important for LSI. Since most search engine bots can determine which content is written for a human and which has been written specifically for the purposes of SEO it should be easy to write content that is LSI optimized: just write for a human.

• Content optimization - Writing your content so that it is SEO optimized is important for achieving rankings, and LSI will simply compound on top of this.

• Website relevance - If your website is about shoes it is unlikely that it will ever rank well for terms related to cars. LSI seeks out related keywords to your content, so it is best to write content that fits into the theme of your website.

Of course there are many other ways to optimize for LSI, but those three are the main ones.  This post, for example, is likely going to be indexed for the highly competitive phrases “search engine optimization” and “latent semantic indexing”, but it will also likely get indexed for related terms such as “optimized content” or “related terms”.  That is the power of LSI, and it is up to you to exploit it.

Ten years ago you could reach the top of Yahoo (the internet’s top search engine at the time) by simply stuffing your pages with the keywords that you were trying to rank for. Today, climbing the SEO charts is a long and complicated dance that involves analyzing just about every aspect of your website. The world, or at least the online component of it, is a very different place.

Keyword density is still important, though it’s no longer the defining variable in determining what makes a website relevant to search engines. Many people write a 10-12% keyword density, but we have had much greater success with a 4-6% keyword density. We believe that this is because of Google’s filters seeing too many of one specific keyword and penalizing the content in question as spam instead of recognizing it as legitimate (albeit SEO’d) content.

To summarize:

• Maintain a 4-6% keyword density. Anything over this amount may be regarded as spam.

• Write naturally. Search engines will place content that has been written for humans higher than content that has been written for search engines.

• Vary your content. Write on topics that will help your SEO as well as establish your website as an authority within the niche.

Oh, and because you will likely (and eventually) have relevant content hosted outside of your website, ensure that:

• The incoming links are targeted. If your site is about shoes ensure that incoming links are from related websites.

• The anchor text is targeted. Use the anchor text to target the keywords you are trying to rank for.