What are Latent Semantic Analysis and “Natural Phrase” Targeting and How Can You Use them for Search Optimization?
Matt Cutts of Google gives an excellent summary of Google’s use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) in an SMX Advanced workshop video. He references the use of the tilde (~) search at Google.com for the term you are focusing on, and he gives some pretty explicit hints about how to write ad copy.
The tilde search will give you a list of sites that are related to that term, but will also highlight related terms from other sites. Then when you look at your own content, you can ask yourself if you are using those related terms enough. Can you swap a few terms? If you want a good tool that will run the tilde search and scrape keywords for you, try this Ontology Finder.
For a great article by Aaron Wall on this topic, read his post here. To summarize the article and its implications for SEO, Wall writes:
- Pages that are too focused on one phrase tend to rank worse than one would expect (sometimes even being filtered out for what some SEOs call being over-optimized).
- Pages that are focused on a wider net



