Oct 06 2008
Latent Semantic Indexing – Is It Still Relevant
The term has been around for a while. It certainly sounds like an important term in the world of SEO. What does it really mean and is it relevant to today’s SEO world. In short, Latent Semantic Indexing is when the search engines look at a keyword and then look at the words around that keyword, then look at the context of the sentence or phrase the keword is located in.
A comment left by OneMansGoal.com a Make Money Online blog on my posting titled “Effective Use of Anchor Text Links” got me thinking about the whole anchor keyword – keyphrase subject. While I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules concerning LSI, I do believe it is important to choose your key words / key phrases carefully when using them within the body of text. If I am writing about the decrease in big truck sales due to the economy in one of my blogs, I certainly do not want to have a phrase in the middle of that posting or sentence that references employment on riverboats. There may be some connection in the back of my mind but to just arbitrarily throw a non releveant term in the sentence or group of sentences just to get a link could very well throw my whole link effort out the window.
Does this make sense? I guess what I am saying is keep the words around your anchor keyword link relevant to the topic of discussion and don’t try to slip one in on the search engines. Taking it a step further I believe that within the body of text, a keyword phrase is more important and of better use than just a keyword. Once again making sure that keyword phrase is relevant to the context of the text around it.
Latent Semantic Indexing is probably not something set in stone but it does make sense to follow this particular type of sentence and paragraph structure.
What are you thoughts on anchor text links and anchor text phrases?
First off thanks for the link and second great article. I was reading something about LSI and I just got done looking for it and I can find it. However the author that the article I read put it into great perspective.
His example was pasta. If said if you are targeting that keyword don’t just throw it in the article as much as possible but he recommended to go to the adwords keyword tool and look at the relevent search phases and he came up with an article that looked like this.
Ummm, I love pasta. Nothing is better that a niche warm bowl and mac and chesse. It doesn’t matter if it is angel hair, penne, or lasanga, I love pasta. The only problem I can find is the charbohydrates.
He went on for a while but the point is the terms follow terms google relevant to pasta
Mac and cheese
angel hair
penne
lasagna
charbohydrates.
So the title say pasta, pasta is contained a couple of times in the articles and latent semantic indexings associate the other terms listed above are about pasta.
Bamn, this page is about pasta.
Later
Using the Adwords tool isn’t necessarily as accurate as using the tilde operator in a Google search. That will highlight the words that Google uses in it’s LSI algos in the returned SERPS and give a much more accurate picture.