As is discussed elsewhere in the Articles section of this website, and is reasonably common knowledge to those interested in the performance of websites in the major search engines, a major contributory factor to attaining a healthy position in the major search engines is the use of keywords/phrases within the copy of the website.

When a search engine, such as Google, sends its bots to spider/crawl a website to analyse its content for indexing it will attempt to ascertain the theme of the website. For example, if you are a builder then when Google indexes your site there should be sufficient ‘clues’ there for Google to understand what the website is about and it can then rank your website in relation to other builder’s websites. This process, in part, is related to keyword density – that is, the amount of times your keywords/phrases appear in the copy of the website. However, the old process of repeating several keywords over and over again on every page doesn’t really wash with the complex algorithms Google and other major search engines use and indeed overuse of repeated keywords can lead to a website being down listed or even banned from search engine results for ‘keyword stuffing’.

So how do you know what to include? Well, the copy (along with a few other pieces of code which we won’t go into here) should still contain your keywords repeated several times and various synonyms and variations (builder, builders etc) but with the development of complex search engine parameters this too is now not enough. The latest buzzword is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) which sounds rather more complicated than it actually is in practice but is essential for understanding how search engines, and in particular Google, index and rank websites and what can be done to improve their positions.

In short, Google indexes millions of websites daily and stores the information gained in vast datacentres and uses this information to provide listings when you make a search and to work-out which website should rank higher than another. In relation to LSI, as previously discussed when Google arrives at your website it attempts to get the theme/subject of the website so let us presume you are a builder and so Google has discerned that your website is about a builder. What it then does is access its vast database of website information, finds all the other websites that it has identified are for builders, builds a list of common keywords and phrases from across all those sites and then looks to see if they appear in your website.

For example, say out of 100 builder website Google has in its database the phrase ‘plastering’ occurs prominently in 15 of them, then it is logical to assume that your website would have the phrase ‘plastering’ in it. If it does, Google gives your website a ‘brownie point’ which gives you a slightly better position in its ranking than if it doesn’t. Obviously the process is a little more complex and multi-layered but the idea is that Google knows what phrases tend to be associated with every imaginable business sector and if it finds them in your website it lends weight to your rankings. Furthermore, these are not to be confused with keywords per se, it is already aware that if your a builder then the word ‘builder’ is a keyword – LSI keywords are related terms and phrases gleaned from the analysis of similar websites.

Whilst you can hazard a guess at what these phrases will be, a good search engine optimisation (SEO) consultant will utilise various software and online resources to produce an LSI keywords ‘cloud’ which will show the LSI keywords related to your actual website keywords. These LSI keywords can then be ’sprinkled’ throughout the website copy so that when Google comes crawling it will see your website as containing all the ingredients to attain a healthy ranking in its search engine results.