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 of related keywords tend to have more stable rankings for the core keyword and rank for a wider net of keywords.
Furthermore, Wall recommends varying the keywords for your inbound text links with the same LSI principles.
LSI is also a good argument for writing long ad copy as opposed to short copy. Long copy brings in thousands of keyword variations automatically. It also tends to automatically create hundreds, if not thousands, of “natural phrase” combinations.
Not only do LSI and natural phrase targeting make better ad copy for search rankings, but they also attract long-tail keyword searches that convert well. In a study of one site for a small local business that receives about 3,000+ searches per month, we looked at the last 6 months and found that of 8,257 different phrases and about 21,000 searches, only 1,037 phrases were repeated according to our logs. That is 7,220 unique phrases or roughly 1/3 of the total over half a year. Many of these phrases are reasonably related. Two thirds of the traffic represents highly relevant topics to the business, either with relevant geo terms or base-industry terms. The varieties of ways people search are extraordinary!
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