SEO Strategy: Use LSI keywords

A site’s SEO strategy will make or break it, so it is vitally important for a site owner to develop a strategy that will maintain page ranking for a long time. Get this right the first time and you can save hours of adjusting and fixing down the road.

Most site owners know the basics of keyword density and HTML tags, but it’s amazing how many forget about one small step that can boost your rankings immediately: LSI keywords. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index, which can really mean a whole host of different things. However, when it comes to search engines, LSI keywords are keywords that engine bots will associate with your main keyword.

For example, if your keyword was “SEO strategy”, you would obviously want to use the phrase 1 – 4% of the time on the page. But you can also use keywords like “search engine placement,” “small business SEO,” and “organic search engine optimization” because search engines associate all of these extra phrases with the primary keyword. This is a great way to push the relevant page in the eyes of search bots without stuffing or spamming your main keyword.

Too often, a page owner will focus solely on the top keywords and leave the rest to chance or destination. This is the same as doing the job halfway and leaving money on the table. With just a little extra effort up front, you can sprinkle LSI keywords throughout your content and stand out above your competition.

As for the density of these LSI keywords, there is no set metric. Many believe that you should have a density of around 3% for your main keyword and a density of around 1% for each of your LSI keywords. With this strategy, you’ll want to limit yourself to 2-3 LSI keywords to avoid looking like a spammer.

Now the obvious question is: how do you know what the LSI keywords are for your main phrase? Fortunately, this couldn’t be easier to figure out. There are dozens of free and inexpensive tools used to find keywords. A couple of examples are the Google Keyword Tool and freekeywords.wordtracker.com. As you do a search for your top keywords, sort the results by relevance. The keyword phrases that appear around your main phrase are the LSI keywords. Give it a try with the “SEO strategy” example provided above and you’ll find the other two phrases mentioned at the top of the results.

So while writing or ordering your web content, pay attention to LSI keywords and add them. It’s a quick and easy way to build an authority site and get on the first page of the SERPs.