How Latent Semantic Indexing Works

When you’re planning out a new website, the first thing that you do before you launch is some simple keyword research, right? You want to make sure you’ve got your primary keywords and the similar long tail versions that you need to account for as well. By doing this type of research you’ll be able to grasp how competitive the number one spot is for all of your terms and figure out exactly how much effort you’ll need to put into ranking them. But focusing all your attention on just using these keywords is not enough.

Take the ever popular example of the keyword phrase “Microsoft Windows”. When you search this in Google, you of course get plenty of results for Microsoft Windows, but what you don’t get is any results for “Home Windows” that you use all around your house. The reason for this?

Latent Semantic Indexing.

When the Googlebot visits your site, not only does it crawl it looking for keywords within the content and relevancy of your site, it also determines the meaning of the words within the content of your site. So when it digs through a site on home decor, it doesn’t rank their windows article next to the failures of windows vista articles splattered all over the web.

But how do you confirm that this is actually true and how do you rank for it?

If you go to Google and search for your keyword, you’ll find that the results show your keyword bold in the meta-description under each result. Try searching your keyword using this method:

~”Keyword” -”Keyword”

What this has done is it has told Google to search for synonyms of your keyword (~) and then remove your keyword from the search results (-”Keyword”). The results that pop up will be fully relevant to your keyword, yet you won’t see it bolded or sometimes even at all in the results.

So while it is definitely worth it to put energy into ranking for your primary keywords and the relevant long tail keywords, remember to utilize synonyms for those keywords within your content as well. Where 5% is a healthy amount for a keyword to be within your content, remember that is per keyword! So feel free to utilize those synonyms to the same extent.

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