Latent Semantic Indexing: Making SEO sound unnecessarily complicated
If you browse webmaster forums like DigitalPoint or SitePoint you’ll sooner or later come across people stating that “web copy must be semantically balanced” or “web copy must bear in mind latent semantic indexing” principles if you want to do well in SERPs. The reality is that using the word “semantic” just makes things sound more scientific and complicated than they need to be.
To strip “latent semantic indexing” back to something simple and understandable, the first thing to do is note that the word “semantic” has the meaning “meaning“. So when an SEO expert says web copy should semantically flow, he really means you write about a single topic on a web page. For example, if you are writing a paragraph about expensive italian leather shoes, don’t put in a little story about how your dog was sick on the carpet this morning: keep the theme consistent.
The second thing to note about the need for decent semantic balancing or flow is that in a lot of ways it boils down to the old advice about not indulging in keyword stuffing. When you write web page copy, don’t keep repeating your chosen keywords so many times that the copy reads unnaturally. If the text reads OK to you and your friends it’s going to be OK to the search engines.
The whole idea behind the major search engines like Google moving towards a latent semantic indexing alogrithm was to improve the quality and accuracy of the search results. For example, if someone searches for “cuddly toy animals”, Google might also include pages about “cuddly toy gorilla” in the results since the phrases have similar meanings. I could have said that “cuddly toy animals” and “cuddly toy gorilla” were semantically related but that would have just have sounded too complicated.
Of course when optimising a web page for keywords - either in the on-page web copy or in the off-page links and anchor text - it doesn’t hurt to give the search engines a helping hand, so build a few links on “cuddly toy animal”, a few for “cuddly toy gorilla” and a few for “cuddly teddybear” if you have a page about cuddly toy animals.
Ultimately, search engines like Google want to give the best results they can to searchers so write web pages with a decent amount of textual content and a decent number of variations of your chosen keywords. Remember to keep your web copy reading naturally and take the opportunity of using alt tags for images to provide variations. Apart from the advice on alt tags, you’d get the same advice if you took an evening class in essay writing or creative writing: like human readers, the search engines like well written text.