The Confident Copywriter

Posts Tagged ‘latent semantic indexing’

If you’ve been marketing online, even for a short time, you understand the importance of keywords. Keywords direct web visitors to the products and services they want…if you’ve optimized your site properly, those visitors end up on your website.

News Flash: Traditional keyword usage is changing.

This is important news for copywriters, because we must understand how to optimize client copy to achieve the best results. Even if you are a business owner writing your own copy, it’s important.

This is important news for anyone who sells a product or service on the web too.

Here’s what’s new:

Keywords will not always be the most important part of an SEO strategy. Why? Because search engines are becoming more sophisticated, increasingly focusing, not just on the keywords themselves, but on the content surrounding the keywords.
Enter Latent Semantic Indexing, a mathematics-based indexing and retrieval method currently being tested. If you’re scratching your head on this one, you’re not alone.

KnowledgeSearch.org explains, “Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.”

OK…in layman’s terms…if you are selling a vegetarian lifestyle guide, your top keyword might be “vegetarian lifestyle”. So you will use the regular methods to optimize your copy for this phrase. However, LSI dictates you must optimize your content for related words and phrases, such as:

• vegetarian
• no-meat diet
• eating healthy
• nutritional requirements
• benefits of eating legumes
… and so forth.

Some of these terms, such as “eating healthy” and “nutritional requirements,” are generic; not specific to “vegetarian lifestyle guide”. However, the search engines expect to find these types of terms in conjunction with a website optimized for your main keyword. These ‘outside’ keywords signal the search engines: “Relevant content found here.”

After all, this is the whole purpose of the search engine: to match the visitor’s query with the right information.

Thankfully, true latent semantic indexing is not yet being used by the search engines, so you have time to get on board. But you can bet computer wizards are working towards this goal. You might as well get ready now.

What are your thoughts on this?