LSI keywords is an SEO term for words that relate to a main keyword, such as synonyms and neighboring concepts. The name refers to latent semantic indexing, an information retrieval technique from the 1980s. According to reports, Google has said that “LSI keywords” do not exist.
Where does the term come from?
Latent semantic indexing was patented by researchers at Bell Communications Research (US 4,839,853, granted 1989). It was designed to find documents in comparatively small collections. SEO articles later claimed that Google ranks pages by “LSI keywords”.
John Mueller of Google wrote on Twitter (now X) on July 30, 2019 that there is no such thing as LSI keywords, according to Search Engine Roundtable.
What applies today?
A thorough text about a topic contains related words on its own. A laptop review mentions battery life, display and keyboard without a keyword list. Related searches and autocomplete suggestions show which terms people connect with a topic. Repeating terms unnaturally counts as keyword stuffing under Google’s spam policies.
Example
A page about “running watch” naturally covers heart rate, GPS and battery life. Adding “latent semantic keywords” to the text does nothing extra.
Sources
- US 4,839,853: Computer information retrieval using latent semantic structure – Google Patentspatents.google.com
- Spam policies for Google web search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Google Says There Is No Such Thing As LSI Keywords – Search Engine Roundtable (secondary source)seroundtable.com
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