Latent Semantic Indexing & SEO

According to the Wikipedia, Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms.

Google uses LSA in its algorithm when determining which pages to serve back to users, the process is called latent semantic indexing (LSI).

Here is a quick way to discover what words Google sees are semantically related to the word you’re trying to optimise for:

In the Google search box preceed your keyword by ~. so for instance if you’re trying to see what keywords Google sees as semantically related to the keyword tennis, type in the Google search box ~tennis.  Here is what you’ll see .  Note all the keywords that Google bolds (besides tennis).  These words like Wimbledon, Sport, and WTA are all semantically related to the keyword “tennis”.

How do you use this information?  Whenever you’re writing new copy for your website, make sure to include semantically related words in the title, meta description and copy of your website.

Also try to get as many links pointing to your site with your original keywords as well as words semantically related to it.