Updated: June 4, 2012
Recently I learned about a new way to look at keywords… a way that, in one sense, means treating them as almost an afterthought in a way.
Now of course we all understand how people use keywords on Google and even some social media channels to find things they’re
looking for.
Say for example you’re in Florida and trying to find the closest mountain rental cabin to take your family to for vacation. You may search for ‘north Georgia cabin rental,’ or maybe ‘mountain rental cabins closest to Florida’ if you’re using a more long-tail keyword. Google will take this and search their index for those terms and provide you with a list of results.
In a non-technical sense, this is what search engines used to do. They would crawl websites and index keywords but do NO other analysis. The more keywords you had in your content, the better. But anyone whose written content for a website in the last 5 years knows, you can’t simply stuff your content with keywords and get ahead.
(In fact, sites get harshly penalized for this practice now)
Search engines now use more sophisticated approaches to analyzing content. As we know from Google’s latest update, they take a much sharper eye to the content sites use and how they develop it.
And let’s not forget the whole canary in coal mine to begin with – relevancy. Simply analyzing keywords often yielded varied results irrelevant to what the searcher was looking for.
But one method, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), analyses the context of words and how they’re used on a page. It’s a sophisticated method Google and others use to provide relevant search results to their users.
What Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI, is on a technical level is a computer algorithm that uses mathematical methods to identify patterns in the relationships of terms and concepts.
What does that mean in English?
Well we all remember good ‘ol grammar school and the days of learning about synonyms, which are different words with the same meaning. Think “car” and “automobile.”
(Don’t worry, I had to look that up to be sure I was correct too : )
Anyway, that’s easy enough for search engines to identify. But there are words you could call polynyms, or words that have multiple meanings. (Or “a name consisting of multiple words” according to http://en.wiktionary.org/). The opposite of a polynym is a mononym, or a single name.
When you say ‘apple,’ are you referring to the fruit or the computer?
Before LSI, these kinds of terms would confuse search engines. Was a user searching for ‘windows’ looking for new windows for their home or were they looking for information on the popular operating system? It’s difficult to know.
What LSI did was help search engines understand keywords in the context of other words on the page. If a page has ‘apple’ and ‘computer’ and especially ‘MacOS’ on it, then it must be about Apple Computers. If it has ‘apple’ and ‘tree’ and/or ‘pie,’ then it must be about the fruit.
How is this a new way of looking at keywords?
Since LSI is examining the relationships words have with each other rather than their quantity, keywords can often be spaced apart and still be linked together through LSI. Just think about how Google displays results for a 3-4 word term you enter.
Example:
Search term: “how to bake pork chops”
5th result
How To Make Tender and Juicy Pork Chops – Cooking Tips
Want the secret on how to make tender and juicy pork chops? From meat selection to baking in the oven, learn to bake and cook pork chops perfectly.
www.howtodothings.com › Food & Drink › Comfort Foods – Cached – Similar
Learning about LSI has made me wonder if keywords should almost be an afterthought when writing web content, site descriptions and meta-tags.
Keywords of course do belong in your content but do they need to be all together? As this site description shows, the relationships of all the words in this description and site copy told Google the site is about ‘how to bake pork chops.’
While it is difficult, I’m trying to put keywords more on the back burner.
But is LSI something you should fret over too much? Absolutely not says Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz. While it’s something you should know about, it’s by no means a critical component of ranking high in the search engines.
Has anyone ever tried this? Let me know if you have and I’ll certainly report on any progress or data when I have it.