LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing

If you are like most people, the term LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is not a term you are familiar with. Few people are. In this article, I explain both what it is and, more importantly, why you should implement LSI in your written content and SEO strategy.

latent semantic indexing

LSI is based around the use of similar, related keywords throughout your content to help search engines better understand your content. Search engines also want to understand your page’s “overall topic”, something they struggle to do accurately.

For example, if I wrote an article around the different types of beer, a search engine would expect certain terms to appear in a well-written piece of content. Terms like “ale, pint, lager, pilsner, pale ale” would make sense in a good piece of content. When search engines see these LSI key terms, they can confidently assume that the article is about beer.

In the past, many articles would use the same word over and over again (keyword stuffing) in order to try and convince (or trick) a search engine into giving that piece of content a high search result ranking. Think about how many articles you read in the past that had the same word repeated over and over again! Luckily, search engines have gotten smarter via machine learning and artificial intelligence over the last few years (check out Google’s “Rank Brain” for a detailed overview of recent advances).

The main takeaway of all this is that search engines are getting smarter and they are rewarding well-written content more and more every day. The days of “keyword stuffing” and “backlink spamming” are fading into the distance and are being replaced by thoughtful, high quality content.

Write content in a natural manner that is geared specifically towards you audience (and not a search engine) and you will succeed in the long run!

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