Have you ever heard of Latent Semantic Indexing – or LSI, for short? It’s a long name for a really cool search result you get in Google when searching for something.
Have you ever searched in Google and noticed that the words you typed in to search for are bolded in the search results, but not always in the exact order you entered them? That’s called latent semantic indexing – simply put, Google will show you sites that contain your search words, even if those words are not all together in one phrase on the site.
This is huge, because your site can actually rank for keywords/phrases that you didn’t intent to optimize your site for. You need to have all the words of the phrase on your site, but Google picks out those words and bolds them to match the keyword phrase being searched. That’s LSI in action.
I have a latent semantic indexing example for you… recently I had someone contact me saying they found me via Google when they searched for “premium web cart outsourcing” and I was #1 in the search results for that phrase!
I do work with Premium Web Cart and I do offer outsourcing services (here and here). Like most marketers, I do keyword research and optimize my site for keyword phrases that show folks are actually searching for that phrase; but I did not specifically optimize my site for “premium web cart outsourcing”. It was latent semantic indexing in action that got me that #1 spot in Google.
In this example of LSI in action, I got a new client based on a LSI search result that I did not set out to optimize my site for! Sweet!
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