For a long time, packing as many keywords as you can into a webpage was the strategy for showing up on page one of search result pages, right?
We’ve learned over the years that page content sizes should be between 500 to 1,000 words, and we know that keywords need to occupy 3% to 5% of that content for it to be classified the way that you want.
However, people have typically been spamming the search engines by loading their content full of keywords and in unnatural sounding ways. That’s where Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) comes in. And it’s a fancy way of saying, “how many different ways can you say something?” And the people who are the most successful in search ranking are taking time when creating their content to list out the different ways of saying their keywords.
These keyword phrases are usually three to five words. There’s always more than one way to say something. So, I recommend expanding your mind and looking at the possible ways of expressing a concept that doesn’t come across as spam. LSI is vital because Google’s comparing you against other experts, and there’s someone else who’s probably ranking number one for a keyword phrase or specific content that you’re trying to outrank.
Your ability to come up with different ways of saying something is going to be key to ranking in that area. As Google crawls and indexes these other web pages and other content, they’re finding all the different ways that things are said, and that’s the criteria that they’re using to separate competitors and to serve up results for people.
So take a little time while you’re creating your content to come up with more than one way to say something. I’d take a look also at your competition and see all the different ways that they’re saying something. For example, if your page has 500 words, you’re goal should be 15 to 25 occurrences of the phrase that you’re trying to rank.
Please take a close look at how your competition is doing it. We’ve also mentioned Google trends in previous posts. Do your research and find out the questions people are asking. Explore what people are doing and what they search for.
Finally, make your content sound as natural as possible so that it can’t be considered spam.