SEO and LSI Is There a Way To Beat The System?
SEO and LSI (latent semantic indexing) and beating the system are terms that tend to not only get attention from people looking to jump to the top of rankings in Google but which actually relate to each other in a twisted way. Why would Google want to examine keywords other than the ones you targeted and of course those looking for shortcuts are asking; is there a way to beat that system?
Perhaps this is best answered by another question. Why would any website want to beat that system? Let’s start with the imaginary Jane Doe’s ecommerce store that sells baby clothes and she wants to optimize it for the keyword strings, cute baby clothes and designer diaper bags. Now what Jane Doe is looking for is customers searching for cute baby clothes, organic baby clothes and designer diaper bags. Beating the system and optimizing for keywords other than baby clothes doesn’t benefit Jane Doe’s store at all.
Jane Doe might optimize her site for the keyword widgets; she could with the help of an SEO company maybe make it to the top of the searches for widgets if she put in enough content about widgets.
However, face it; Jane’s company is not in the widget business. That extra traffic she might get will generate very few sales and some disgruntled visitors. Moreover she has by her own choices helped make her site irrelevant.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) weights related keywords and helps, and I do say only helps in determining a site’s relevancy. However, it doesn’t determine how much that site will sell or how optimizing for Widgets will help Jane Doe clothing sales.
On the other hand, if Jane Doe site is optimized for her relevant keyword terms she will not only find it easier to climb higher in rankings, she will also find her visitors actually interested in the product she offers. Sure widgets might get more searches a day than blue organic specially designed diaper holders, but since Jane doesn’t sell widgets, the extra traffic is unlikely to help Jane’s bottom line and is sure to burn up her bandwidth.
Once again let’s look at the purpose to SEO on an ecommerce website. A site is optimized to draw visitors and potential customers to the store so they can hopefully purchase the items offered. If a site is optimized for unrelated keywords it is relatively difficult to offer the visitor anything they can use or want. What this means for the average ecommerce merchant is that best practice SEO and whatever Google’s LSI algorithm of the day is may work for them rather than against them.
Rather than beating the system, understanding SEO (or hiring a good service to do it for you) and using it wisely is in the long term a lot more useful for the merchant with a real product to sell. Like Jane Doe and her baby store, optimizing and utilizing words related to baby products and clothes benefits her most and is easiest to work into her store.