The Age of Keyword Stuffing is Over -- Welcome LSI

I've been working on writing a new guide that explains a few ranking tricks (especially on Google). Since it deals a little with LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, I thought I'd do a brief post here about it since it's been gaining in popularity lately.

LSI essentially means that the days of keyword stuffing are over. SEO experts in the past used to think that a certain percentage of a particular keyword was optimal if you wanted to get ranked for it. For instance, they might say that you'd need to use a particular phrase 5% of the time throughout your page. Sometimes it's very hard to do this without it appearing to be unnatural, which it is. Hardly anyone in real writing repeats the same phrases over and over again.

Real sites with real content appear more natural, and Google wants these to rank higher. As a result, they try to look at how often related keywords appear throughout the page too. For instance, the keyword "Christmas" might be associated with Santa, Christmas trees, Christmas Eve, Santa Claus, presents, etc. Or "World War II" might be associated with WWII, WW2, World War 2, Nazis, Hitler, Axis, Allies, Normandy Invasion, etc.

So instead of using the term "World War II" over and over again, you want to use it less but substitute in other terms for it and use other related keywords throughout your webpages or articles.

There are a variety of cool tools to help you with this. One such tool is this LSI keyword lookup tool -- it will offer you other terms that are found to be related to the terms you look up.

You can also go to Google and do any search, but add the ~ symbol before your search and you'll notice that Google will put related keywords in bold AND you'll get some slightly different results.

So to sum it up, pretty soon keyword stuffing will be a BIG no no (it already is, but even more so now). I've seen a few neat tools come out to help with LSI, but you should also keep in mind that it applies to more than just keywords on your page. It also applies to anchor text being used that's linking to your site and so forth. I have a much more thorough guide in the works that exploits some of these tricks, but more on that later.

But to put things in simple terms, the more natural you write, the better in the long run ... although keeping a little LSI in mind certainly might help.