Latent semantic Indexing - Does this help rankings/relevance?

[Bondara]

Hi,

Does semantically related words to the target term on a page help with rankings/relevance?

If your after the term 'PC Screen' and you use the term 'PC Monitor' will go make the connection and also reward you because of the relevance?

Anyone do this and have you seen any positives?

I've just started to try this out lately and have been combining it with Wordle.net to give me an indication of where the content piece is heading and how aggressive the content leans towards certain words (makes things a little more interesting then calculating densities).

[Bondara]

Nice cheers Irving,

I can see how LSI could open the doors to other variations showing up in the SE's.

Do you think a search engine such as Google makes the connection between terms such as 'PC Screen' and 'PC monitor' and do you think this is a factor in rankings?

For example, if a page was targeting the term 'PC Screen' but the page included the word 'Montior' a few times do you think that word would benefit the term 'PC Screen' in relevance/rankings.

Thanks for your time, it's something im trying understand more.

[irvingw]

Absolutely. All content should have synonyms and singular/plural and reversed order variations of the keyword phrase if possible, not just for LSI but also for better optimization for long tail and alternative keywords.

"PC monitor" might even be a secondary keyword. It shows Google that your page really is about PC Screens and not just some BS SEO article written with "PC screen" thrown in a bunch of times.

[Sean_Dawes]

You should always do the onsite technical towards a hierarchy of targeted keywords but yes relevance does matter. Not only onsite but I have seen impact of anchor text relevance from external sites linking to my sites.

Google is all about quality. Also which user experience would you prefer, one where the content is relevant or is keyword stuffed?