Wednesday, August 25, 2010


Latent Semantic Indexing aka LSI is a form of indexing that the search engines use.It is a technique of analyzing, listing or categorizing certain keywords or phrases in the contents of various websites in such a way that they have contextually and conceptually the same or related intent and meaning despite the different words used in them.

The explanation above may sound a little long winded, in short it means using different variations of your keywords. So for SEO you would use search engine optimisation – Search engines – Onsite – offsite – ranking factors and so on.

As you can see the keywords above are all related to SEO. In the past if you wanted to rank for the keyword SEO then you would use that very keyword a number of times on your website. The search engines have now evolved and this no longer works.

So using synonyms of your keywords is the way ahead and the way in which the major search engines such as Google advise us to layout our text.

In the same way a LSI structure of contents is required then so is a LSI structure of anchor text. SO instead of creating a number of backlinks pointing to your website with the keyword SEO for example, you would rather use variations of your keywords as in the example above.

Optimising your text and webpages in this LSI form and also using the LSI structure for your anchor text will ensure that you do not get pulled up from spam and it will also help you to rank for many more keywords.

To drive certain keywords up in the rankings then I would advise to build more backlinks with that keyword as the anchor text however, do not forget to vary your anchor text along the way. I would also suggest using your domain url as a backlink alone as if your website was to get pulled up for human review then it will not be striking that all of your backlinks are anchor text backlinks which can be a sign of spam.