Small Business Tech Tips

When it comes to SEO for your website or blog, it pays to follow best practices.  Yet if you are new to this industry then you may not even know what these best practices are.  You have probably heard about meta data or backlinking when talking about SEO but how about latent semantic indexing (LSI)?  This is an interesting concept that is also valuable for search engine optimization.

What Are LSI Keywords?

According to Wikipedia LSI is “an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text. LSI is based on the principle that words that are used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings.”

In laymen’s terms this simply means that these are words that are similar to your main keyword and are used throughout your webpage/article in place of your keyword.  In a perfect world you would want to include your primary keyword as many times as possible in your article to rank highly in the search engines, yet if you do this too much you will appear to be spammy and will be penalized.  Instead you can use your LSI keywords in place of the primary to gain the search engine rankings you are shooting for without overdoing it.  For example, lets say my primary keyword is “dog training”.  A list of LSI keywords that would work for this case are: puppy training, dog housebreaking, dog behavior, etc.

Where to Find LSI Keywords

If you are not already using tools for your keyword research, I HIGHLY recommend you start.  There are a number of both free and paid tools that are all great for this task, but for the purposes of this article I will be talking about the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  This is a free tool provided by Google that gives great information when it comes to researching keywords.  If you have never used it before go check it out and get familiar with the interface.  If you plan to do keyword research often you will want to get familiar with this tool.

When using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool here’s how to find your LSI keywords.  To begin, simply search for your primary keyword within the search and wait for the results to load.  Once they do, look down for the area that is labeled “Keyword Ideas”, after you found it then you are done.  That entire list of keywords are all LSI keywords.  Simply select the ones that you see fit and you are set.

How To Use LSI Keywords

The hard part about LSI keywords are finding them, after that everything else is a cake walk.  Savy online marketers tend to sprinkle these LSI words all throughout their articles.  I personally typically shoot for a keyword density of 2% for my primary keyword and any other instance of my primary keyword after that I replace with my LSI words.

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Read more by: Michael Booker

Tags: How To Use LSI Keywords, latent semantic indexing, What Are LSI Keywords, what is latent semantic indexing, Why Are LSI Keywords Important

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 at 11:56 am and is filed under Small Business Internet Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.