In the SEO world, LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is a method of ranking websites based on the words they contain, and not just keywords. LSI has become popular since Google has an algorithm that provides better search results using what are known as LSI words. We’ll talk more about that later here.
How LSI works
Let’s start with an example. He thinks that someone wants to search for something related to Blackberry, mobile phones. But how does the search engine know that you are looking for Blackberry, the phone, and not Blackberry, the fruit? That’s where it’s used LSI words. Search for the other words in your keyword phrase that you used to search for content. Then check all the articles on the Internet that have those other words. Looking at those other words, it builds a pattern of words that are specific to Blackberry, the cell phone.
If you have searched for ‘new Blackberry models’, then the search engine will look for these three words: new + Blackberry + models. It will search for articles that contain these three words, and preferably in the same order. It will then give you results that have these words in different orders. And, when even that runs out, it will look for items that have variations of these words…as for models, the variations could be devices, units, phones, etc. For newcomers, variations can be modern, current, recent, etc. These are all LSI keywords.
Eventually, the results you get are variations of the keyword phrase you entered. What you get will definitely be related to Blackberry cell phones. Fruits are definitely out!
How LSI helps in SEO
LSI helps in search engine optimization. Simply, as Google indexes web pages according to the words they contain, it arrives at a pattern. To put it in plain language, web pages that have more of the words that Google has found in the pattern will rank higher than others that don’t have these words.
In simple terms, LSI is a method of ranking websites based on the number of popular words related to the main keyword it contains. Even if each word is present only once, the impression is that this is a web page that has more meaningful content, and Google will be proud to display it in its search results. Most of the best SEO companies will analyze the LSi keywords used on a website.
How to use LSI
There are several sources that can help you improve your web content using LSI words. You could use a dedicated tool like Quintura, Wordtracker, or you could even use a free tool like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Simply enter your primary keyword here and you’ll see the LSI words displayed in a cloud (in Quintura) or as a table (in Google AdWords).
It can be helpful to use a few LSi words in your incoming anchor text links, to make your link building efforts look natural to search engines.
Just use as many of these words as you can, and you’ll have wonderfully search engine optimized content. Search engines will be happy that you have all the words that people are looking for, and you’ll be happy about the increased flow of traffic your websites are starting to receive.
