What are LSI Keywords and Why are They So Important?

The Importance of LSI Keywords

When it comes to making an online living, it is pretty hard to do so without a good ranking website. Your top priority should be to get the website indexed and ranked. Many people still overlook one of the best ways to get a website ranked fairly quickly. They often overlook the value of LSI keywords. Unlike the primary keywords that most bloggers and website owners like to overuse, LSI keywords can help to greatly improve a website's rank tremendously. This article is going to talk about LSI keywords and why they are so important to SEO (search engine optimization).

The Right Information

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing which is a method in which search engines have adopted in order to determine the subject matter of websites. Search engines need to properly index, categorize and rank your website before they can present your site to online searchers. However, before they can do this, they first have to know understand exactly what your content is about. The search engines will send out spider bots to crawl your website in order to gather this information. Unfortunately, using the same keyword over and over again does not provide enough information for the spider bots. This is know as keyword stuffing or keyword spamming and can land you in the penalty box. They need the right information in a format that they can understand.

Your content must be written in a descriptive manner. Keep in mind that some keywords are somewhat vague or can be used for many different topics. The human eye can tell what a webpage is about, but automated spider bots do not have this capability. If you want the search engines to index and rank your website properly, then use semantically related keywords.

It's Not Just Semantics

The best way to explain the concept of LSI is to use an example. Let's say you used the Google Keyword Tool to find your primary keyword(s). If your primary keyword is "wedding cakes," other similar words such as icing, wedding toppers, bride and groom, and wedding cake flavors should also naturally appear on the same webpage. Fortunately, these words will also cause your site to come up in those related searches. They might be looking for wedding cake toppers, but your webpage for wedding cakes will come up as well because it is semantically related. So, more LSI keywords mean more possible searches in the long run.

Repeating the keyphrase "wedding cakes" over and over makes your content unreadable, unnatural, and spammy to both search engines and people. So the search engines determine it has little value and either places it at the bottom of the results or your site gets deindexed.

Content is Still King

Did you know that the search engines love content that has plenty of LSI keywords? Always remember that content is king. Adding LSI keywords to content gives the search engines more meat to sink their teeth into. It provides more information that is similar and makes sense. It all ties in and makes for reading that is more natural than keyword stuffed content. An article flows better when natural words are used to get a point across. If an article comes across as being artificial and restrictive, then it will not receive a good ranking from the search engines.

Better Content Means More Exposure

More LSI keywords will give your content more exposure. Sometimes in error, people will use the same keyword over and over again on the same webpage giving it too high of a keyword density for your primary search term. Not only does this annoy the search engines and website readers, but it lowers your website's exposure. However, when LSI keywords are used, it gives your content more chances to come up in additional web searches because these words will come up in related searches. Don't worry about having to know all of keyword related to your primary search phrase as their are tools that can help you find them. It is important to know initially that you need to implement them strategically, but naturally in your content and you will see a tremendous difference in the rankings.