Content optimisation is every bit as important as backlinks. In the end, people will neither share nor link to your articles if they lack quality.
However, there is much more to it.
Quality of the content is not only determined by its impact on the readers. It is also determined by its impact on the search engines.
Similar to your visitors, Google expects to see certain words when it crawls an article. Based on this information, it will either increase or decrease your rankings.
Here’s a nice list with tools you can use to find related keywords for your content from Content Marketing Institute.
Unfortunately, Google cannot reliably establish whether information is correct or not. However, it can determine if your article is really about a particular topic.
With that, we come to LSI keywords.
What are LSI keywords?
LSI (latent semantic indexing) is a term that has been here for a while.
Since Knowledge Graph, search engines have used it regularly as a way to determine the real intent behind content.
Over time, the technology has also been implemented on Hummingbird and RankBrain.
What is so great about LSI keywords?
Unlike previous algorithms, which were based on keywords repetition, latent semantic index focuses on weighing each word separately.
For example, if you are talking about cars, it is expected that your content will also consist words such as carburetor, tires, gasoline, highway etc.
But, that is not all.
The LSI system doesn’t only determine a set of words that should be present in text. It also determines the number of repetitions.
Based on this repetition, the search engine can establish how important each word is and how to rank your article for every search phrase.
Google can do this by establishing all the word connections within a text.
Why are LSI keywords important?
Adding your main keyword is just a minor part of content creation.
In fact, given how sophisticated Google’s algorithm is, focusing on that one keyword will be more damaging than anything else.
Instead of spamming one and the same phrase, you need to create a corpus of words.
What do I mean by that?
During a natural writing process, you will most likely add related words and synonyms.
In the end, it is highly unnatural to write about cars if you never mention automobile, vehicle (synonym) or engine (related words).
When writing copy, it is necessary to write as any other human would do.
In fact, by being completely natural, you are feeding Google just the right type of article it wants to see.
Even if you create an awesome piece, with an enormous number of shares and links, Google will still not allow you to penetrate the top 5 results.
This might be due to the fact that your article is not related to a particular keyword.
How can I find and implement LSI keywords?
There are 3 easy, yet very powerful ways, you can find LSI keywords for your article. And no, you don’t need any fancy paid keyword ranking tools to do this.
Here’s how to do it.
Open Google and write your search term in the search box. Make sure you’ve activated instant search results for your browser. You’ll need these auto suggestions.
See the 10 suggested phrases and write them down on your list.
Next, scroll down to the bottom of the 10 results Google’s showing you on its first page. There you’ll see 8 more suggestions which are called “searches related to”.
Boom! You now have yet another 8 LSI keywords ready to be implemented in your written copy.
Here you go, you’re packed with 18 great latent semantic indexing keywords for your blog post.
But wait, there’s more.
Have you noticed that Google tends to bold some of the words on its search engine result pages?
This is no accident.
These bolded words or phrases are also LSI keywords you can implement in your piece.
If this is not enough, or you want to save yourself some time, I suggest you check these 5 LSI tools that can help you with your research.
Conclusion
LSI keywords are a rather logical concept. With it, Google is able to understand human language just a bit better.
If you are a writer who recently started blogging, this transition shouldn’t be too severe for you.
In normal copy, all these words should be present anyway. All you have to do is to make sure that they’re inside the text and are not overstuffed.
Remember, keyword density is a dead concept nowadays. The reason why you should pay attention to this metric is to make sure you’re not overdoing things.
Now you’re ready to start using latent semantic indexing keywords to their full potential and boost your pages’ SEO performance.