Latent Semantic Indexing

by Herb Firestone
Marketing Coordinator

Last December Directory One SEO specialist, Nick Perone wrote an article titled Latent Semantic Indexing, the Future of SEO.

After explaining what latent semantic indexing is, namely “a way for search engines to index websites and answer search queries without relying solely on keywords or key phrases,” the article goes on to say that “the idea behind LSI is that it matches themes or concepts rather than words.”

What Ann Smarty added to the mix at the beginning of this month is yet another search engine optimization keyword research tool called Lexical FreeNet – Connected Thesaurus.

This tool will find you keywords related to the one or two words you provide. Take the word provide itself, for example. The tool returned 256 related words. As usual the results needed to be edited. For example you might find the synonyms such as furnish, render, offer and supply reasonably useful, while the trigger phrases, for example, provide insurance completely useless.

What makes the Lexical tool especially handy as part of the SEO process is that it enables you to use related words as opposed to the same old primary key phrase over and over.

The tool allows you to filter in or out sixteen different characteristics and even lets you limit your results to nouns, verbs, adjectives and/or adverbs.

Final Thoughts

The filtering options are what makes the Lexical tool better or more useful than just a regular Thesaurus, and if there’s an SEO tool out there that Ann Smarty hasn’t found yet, it’s a good bet that it’s only a matter of time.