What does the word Optimization mean to you? Although personally, we may have differing opinions about what the term infers, knowing exactly what it means to search engines is essential for improving your organic website placement.

I have referenced this tip before in our search engine optimization strategy of the week, but it was something I wanted to touch upon again. Latent semantic indexing is a process that determines the way search engines associate words.

Instead of keyword stuffing (adding your keywords numerous times to inflate the importance of your pages) you can simply use alternative terms that describe the same concept and thus strengthen your foothold for all of the related terms that fall under the umbrella.

Understanding how to employ latent semantic indexing from a strategic prospective and using it in conjunction with long-tail search engine optimization, is an invaluable tool that provides keyword-rich suggestions for content, descriptions or titles for your website or blog. Essentially within a few minutes time using Google and by adding one character before a keyword, you can strike keyword gold and find a variety of keyword alternatives to enhance your rankings.

For example applying keyword research for the word “optimization” highlights the following associated words in bold. The associated terms discovered through latent semantic indexing in Google based on the seed word optimization were:

analysis
positioning | position
performance | perform
placement
submission | submit
speed
optimizing | optimize

Understanding this you could incorporate them into a sentence and place the sentence strategically on your pages in order to achieve stronger organic rankings for your keywords that you have clearly identified for that page. For example, based on the keywords above one could compile a sentence that would rank well in search engines and augment the term “optimization”. In this example, every keyword is used in some form, but used strategically. This is also a great way to look for terms for your tags when blogging.

Example: In order to optimize the performance of your website or blog’s position in search engines, analysis of the keywords you utilize can tremendously affect search engine placement.

Using this method for developing your content is completely ethical and naturally strengthens the content and word density without resorting to spamming the engines or affecting usability for your visitors.

So what is the magical grapheme symbol we have been discussing? It is the tilde ~.

Place the tilde in front of a keyword / search term in Google then hit return, the words you see bolded in the search results determine other known indexed words that correspond to your keyword for that search engine.

In this case I used the word

~optimization

So, the next time you are looking for alternatives for keywords for Ad Words, Blogs, Tags, Titles, Descriptions or content, Use the tilde before the search term and replacing the word optimization with whatever term you would like.

-Jeffrey

Or Stick Around and Read More Posts