LSI and SEPS - Their Impact On Your SEO Efforts

Organic Results

The major search engines are constantly striving to improve their search results. Their aim is to provide surfers with genuinely useful and organic results because, in doing so, they will improve their own popularity with the surfers. The result is that search engine algorithms evolve regularly and new methods are used to determine those sites that do offer real value as well as those that are attempting to dupe the search engine indexes.

What Is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)?

LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, is the indexing of documents based on their keywords but also on semantically related keywords. For example, it would be reasonable to assume that a document that is indexed by the keyword "marketing" could also be indexed by similar keywords such as "advertising" and "promotion".

How Search Engines Employ LSI In Their Algorithms

Search engines have begun to use a form of LSI in their web page indexing. However, they also take this a step further. Rather than looking for a single keyword within a document, search engines bid to find pages that include a list of semantically related keywords (within the content, and also within a link profile) based upon a relevant theme and give those documents preference when compiling their search results.

How LSI Effects Website Owners

At a basic level, this means that rather than cramming a page with the keyword "marketing", you should aim to write content naturally in order that the page includes semantic keywords such as "advertising" and "promotion". It also means that when building links you should use all of these keywords in your anchor text (not in one go obviously).

While the aim of the search engines is to offer searchers a more organic set of results, it can still pay to give the spiders a helping hand in determining the topic and the most relevant set of semantic keywords. Organic writing may include some of the most relevant keywords for your pages, but it doesn't hurt to ensure that you include the keywords that the search engines deem to be the most relevant.

LSI Keyword Research

Keyword research for SEO has obviously also evolved. Rather than attempting to find the single best keyword, or a short list of keywords, for a single page it is necessary to broaden your horizons. Most website owners should already have a good idea of how their visitors, or potential customers, search for their website. This knowledge provides a good basis for developing a strong list of keywords but, again, it doesn't hurt to supplement your organic knowledge with some synthetic assistance.

There is a good amount of keyword research software available and the most advanced, or at least the most modern of these applications provide a means to display relevant keywords as well as specific keywords. These synonyms can provide an even stronger basis for your SEO efforts by grouping them together in terms of relevance and importance.

What Are Search Engine Proven Synonyms (SEPS)?

In order to delve even deeper and find the keywords that the search engines believe are related, we need to rely on SEPS. SEPS is short for Search Engine Proven Synonyms and are those keywords that the search engines believe to be semantically related to another keyword. While there are tools and applications available to provide you with this information, Google itself provides a perfectly good tool towards this very end.

Using Google To Find Your SEPS

On the Google search page, rather than simply typing "marketing" we would type "~marketing". Those words displayed in bold are the semantically related keywords that Google believes are relevant to your search term. Scattering, or at least including these terms and keywords in your text will help Google identify that your page is based around that set of keywords.

For key phrases of more than one word add the ~ before each word in place of the space. So, to find the SEPS for the term "internet marketing" we would in fact search using the string "~internet~marketing". Terms such as "Internet business marketing" and "promotion" are bolded when you use this method - these terms should be included in your keyword list for a page based on the phrase "Internet marketing" in order to help achieve the best results.

Using Your LSI Keywords And SEPS

Website content is by no means the only aspect of SEO, although it is an important one. The keywords you research should be used where appropriate without spamming your pages or any other media. Alt tags, and meta tags that include keywords can include some of your SEPS and related keywords because these are often also used to determine the value of a page.

Improving Your Link Profile

Building a link profile is a huge part of a successful SEO campaign and, again, your broad keyword list needs to come into play. Rather than building or developing hundreds or thousands of links using a single keyword or key phrase as the anchor text, vary the keywords you use. Use SEPS to improve the overall effectiveness of your link profile, and also to help target a greater number of keywords.

Don't Lose Sight Of Your Ultimate Goal

Throughout the whole of this process it is important to remember that your ultimate goal is unlikely to be just the generation of more traffic. Increased sales, improved conversions, and profit levels are much more important to businesses than a greater number of visitors to a website. Fortunately, in the promotion of organic writing, the search engines are helping in this respect too.

Organic content provides the content writer or website owner with a greater potential to write appealing content and appealing content is much more likely to convert visitors into customers than keyword crammed text. Never lose sight of your end goal - less traffic but more conversions is a more appealing outcome than masses of traffic that simply bounces away from your site without taking any action.

About WebWiseWords

WebWiseWords specializes in creating appealing and effective SEO copywriting. By using their web content writing services, it enables business and website owners to concentrate on other core aspects of running a business while ensuring that they get the greatest return on their marketing ROI.