SEO or LSI with Article Marketing

| by Paula Brett |

I’m sure you know that a major part of promoting products and websites is writing articles.

For years, if you wanted your articles to be found on search engines, you wrote them with SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) in mind. You’d choose a keyword or phrase that people would search for, then you would write your article with that keyword or phrase appearing about 3% of the time. That way the search engines’ spiders would find your article and list it favorably when someone searched for the given term.

A few months ago, though, something changed. Google and other search engines decided to try to get away from SEO and have moved towards what is called LSI.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and it is the new way search engines are trying to rank findings. In theory, LSI takes into account not only a keyword or phrase but also other words and phrases that are similar.

Let me try to explain……….. if you have the keyword phrase “buy shoes”, for example, then if you were using SEO techniques you would write those two words about 15 times in a 500 word article (about 3%). But now, with LSI, you should be writing “buy shoes” a few times and then you should also include other phrases like “buy footwear”, “purchase shoes”, “buy boots”, and “get shoes”.

In this way, according to LSI, the article will have more value and be ranked higher in the search results. The SEO technique would be recognized as trying to capture the higher ranking and therefore it would be listed much lower in the results.

It would seem that there’s definitely a move towards LSI and I would advise you to be be writing your articles based around LSI rather than SEO. It wouldn’t hurt, though, to do a cross between the two. In other words, make sure you have your actual phrase appearing a few times but also make sure you use other phrases.

One of the things to remember with writing articles is that getting a high ranking is only half the battle won. You still need to get people to click on your article, read it, and then click through to your site.

If the article is a load of old poop (as most SEO articles were and still are) then the people are not going to click through. So while it should always be in the back of your mind to incorporate the keywords and similar words and phrases, it should always be in the front of your mind to write a good article.

Think about it.

Scenario 1: You write a bad article that ranks well and 3,000 people view it but only 2 people actually click through or stay on your site.

Scenario 2: You write an awesome article that is ranked very well but only gets 30 people looking at it – the article is so good that 10 of those people click through or stay on your site.

OK, yes, whilst the initial result isn’t as good with the `awesome’ article, the end result is fantastic.

So, remember to keep the big picture in sight at all times. And that big picture is that people have minds, even though search spiders don’t, and people will only give business to that which they think deserves their business.

The question isn’t whether you should write according to SEO or LSI. Google and other search engines are proving the argument to be moot – LSI is the chosen method. The real question is whether your article is good enough to actually capture people’s attention. Because that’s when your article will really work; your article will bring you visitors which will, in turn, make you money.

For a much more comprehensive explanation of how to write articles according to LSI principals you can check out the “Article Marketing Domination” course.

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