Patrick McDowell's Blog

Using latent semantic content in your posts can help you rank for the terms you want using less keyword density, and still being just as effective. As search engine algorithms become more and more complex, latent semantic indexing is going to become more and more popular.

What is Latent Semantic Content?

Say the keyword you are trying to rank for is public school funding. In the old days you could just repeat that ten times, drop some links and you were good to go. Obviously it is not that easy anymore, and we can really only use the keywords a handful of times before it becomes spammy.

We can use the keywords as little as once or twice and still rank just as high, if we use words that are related to the subject throughout our content. Look at the chart below:

Google sees all of these keywords as related. Thus using any of these keywords is just as good as using the keyword itself. In reality you should use latent semantic content as much as possible, simply because it looks all the more natural. Remember if your are wearing the white hat, you are writing for people, not search engines.

How Do I Know What Google Considers Latent Semantic?

Luckily, the big G made that easy for us. Check out this link, and look at the search box. All you need to do is put a simple tilde (~) before your keywords, and any word in bold under your results is considered latent semantic.