Understanding Latent Semantic Indexing & How to Use It to Overcome the Competition
Search engines constantly implement new algorithms and techniques for evaluating the endless amount of data that humans produce. Understanding how to leverage these new techniques will put you ahead of the curve, which in turn means you can outsmart other businesses.
Let’s take a look at latent semantic indexing before exploring how you can use it in your next online marketing campaign.
What Is LSI?
Latent semantic indexing (LSI) may seem like a mathematically complex subject, but it’s incredibly easy to understand. It is a mathematical way for machines to evaluate how words in a string are related to every known word.
It’s worth noting that LSI is not simply searching for synonyms. It searches for words that are related to the subject. For example, “Car dealership” may be related to “Toyota”, “Used Cars”, “Places to Buy Cars” and other similar terms.
How Can You Use LSI?
There are two main reasons you should incorporate tactics that appeal to LSI into your content creation campaigns:
- It helps to differentiate your word usage, which makes your pages look more natural and less like spam.
- It allows you to rank for similar words that you may otherwise miss.
The way you use LSI is relatively simple. You just need to use words that are related to whatever you may be writing about while varying your word choice enough to make your content appear natural.
This Means:
- Deriving lists of LSI keywords from Google and other LSI tools
- Including variations of keywords in the headers of your page
- Using similar terms that are related to your main terms throughout your text
- Incorporating alt text and other accessibility markup to describe things machines may be unable to incorporate, which includes images
- Interlinking your pages to point to one page using both your main and LSI keywords
Looking for other ways to get a leg up on the competition? Turn to Saba SEO, the SEO agency San Diego companies trust for their online marketing needs. Give us a call at (858) 277-1717 and ask about a free website audit. We look forward to talking to you!