The latest bit of Goggledegook to enter the popular lexicon
Listening to the masses, you would be forgiven for thinking that ‘Latent Semantic Indexing‘ was some kind of new, sophisticated SEO technique you should be applying to your site.
The term came to my attention again this week in an email from someone who put ‘LSI’ in a list of strategies he was considering for boosting his site traffic.
If fact, latent semantic indexing describes a process by which a search engine might rank your page by evaluating the semantic ‘context’ in which your keywords appear.
Thus you can’t just fill your website or blog with the word ‘Tractor’ and hope to sail to the top of Google when someone searches for ‘tractors’. Latent semantic indexing provides the search engine with a pool of other expected and ’semantically’ related words; so you’d better think about including “farmyard”, “collie”, “chicken”, “combine”, “set-aside” and “huge EU subsidy” to name but a few.
If you’re thinking of paying some handsome young thing a hefty wedge of money to apply ‘LSI’ to your site to increase your page rank, dont’ bother because there’s a much cheaper and far more effective way to ensure the semantic integrity of your keyword placement.
Just write real stuff for a real audience to read.
The alternative? This. It’s beyond irony.
Thanks Ronald. It’s a bit shaky on Firefox and Safari (the numbers columns sometimes go completely out of whack) but looks a good idea.
The way I look at it is that with a blog, the keywords fall into two areas: those in the page titles and headers and those in the blog.
So long as both come from the same startpoint (i.e. our business specialism then they remain semantically-related.
On first run, this tool looks useful. One question though; whose is it? How do they benefit from making it available?
It’s easy to find LSI keywords now! There’s a free tool available here: http://lsikeywords.com
It searches the top 10 in Google for a search phrase and then it returns most used words and phrases on those ten top ranking pages, it then orders the list and you can easily use those terms for your articles and site.