SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

Latent Semantic Indexing

Posted by Bryan at June 3rd, 2008

The first step to building a website or blog is to, of course, do keyword research. You want to establish your primary keywords and their long tail variations as well. This will allow you to determine the type of competition you’ll be going up against when striving to hit the #1 spot on the SERPs, and for many, this is all they focus on.

Recently, light has been shed on a practice that Google has been taking part of, known as latent semantic indexing. Few webmasters and SEOs actually know about this type of indexing and even less actively use it.

So what exactly is latent semantic indexing, and what makes it so important?

Have you ever thought about how Google differentiates between two words with exactly the same meaning? When your site is indexed by the Googlebot, not only does it pick up on your keywords, but it picks up on the context as well. This allows it to understand that your website about Microsoft Windows shouldn’t show up in the SERPs for Home Windows.

When you enter a search into Google, you’ll notice that your keywords searched are in bold in the title and description. Now take your specific keyword and try the following:

~”keyword” -”keyword”

The Tilda key tells Google to search for synonyms of that word. The minus key tells Google to the keyword from the search. The results you’ll get will be full of appropriate information for your keyword, without using your keyword in the search.

Instead of spending all your time on your specific keywords, make sure to search for synonyms for them. Use this process for the keyword list you’ve already built, and take note of the terms that Google chooses to highlight. Next time you add content to your site, start using a few of those here and there and watch as your ranking for your main keyword begins to improve.