Learning Keywording and LSI: Exercises

It's not hard to understand what keywording and LSI (latent semantic indexing) are, but it's a lot harder to figure out how to incorporate them into your everyday writing. Why is that? I asked myself today.

Duh. Because we don't really practice them, not in a structured way. If you are anything like me, you write the article and sort of vaguely count where things are. While in other types of writing, you perform exercises that help you practice techniques, keywording and LSI don't really have a deep instructional background to help you improve your abilities in these methods.

So - here are some exercises you can use to improve your natural ability to keyword or use your LSI. Practice these, and you'll be able to raise your PVs over time by naturally writing more concise optimized text - without hardly even trying.

With each exercise, incorporate all rules from previous exercises. For instance, conciseness will require you to write an article of EXACTLY 400 words. All the exercises following this one should also be EXACTLY 400 words when you are required to write an article. (This technique teaches you careful word choice, and it's more powerful than its simplicity would imply.)

Exercises:

1. Conciseness. It's hard to write tight, concise text. Many use unnecessary words. As Strunk and White recommends, eliminate unnecessary words. Your exercise: take a topic you're currently considering writing up, and write an article in EXACTLY 400 words. If the article is too long with your first writing, go through and find unnecessary words and phrases to eliminate. If it's too short, research the topic further to find items that you can add to the article. The idea is to write an article longer than 400 words, and then edit out unnecessary words. Right now. Not easy, is it?

Exercise: Write that article. Exactly 400 words.

2. Keyword and topic choice. Topic choice is at least as important as keywording when you're getting ready to write a new article. The first rule: choose something that interests you and that you already know something about. The second rule: choose something that will interest other people. Best topics answer a question.

Once you have a topic chosen, go here.

Enter your topic keyword or keyword phrase. Click the Get More Keywords button. Now look through the list. Your best keyword choice is the one that has two high bars; the first bar is the most important, as it shows search volume, but the second one is important, as it shows popularity among advertisers and may impact your article payments.

Your exercise: Choose a keyword phrase that rates well in the AdWords tool. Go to Google and double-check the keyword by searching for it. If you have between 1 and 5 million returns, you probably have a good phrase. Even better if a lot of the top returns are spam; that means there's room for good content there.

Now use that keyword and write an article - or incorporate it into the article you wrote for #1. Adhere to the exactly-400-word limit.

3. Keyword placement. This one's easy. Associated Content looks for 1-4% keywording, which is not hard to reach. Get your keywords in the following places:

Title - early in the title, not late

Subtitle

First Paragraph

Last Paragraph

Each Heading

Try to use one header for every 150 words in your article. For a 400-word article, 2 headers are good.

As you can see, good keywording does not require overuse of words or keyword stuffing. It just requires that you pay attention to where you're putting your words.

Your exercise: Take the article in #2 and apply what you just learned about keyword placement to it. Again, adhere to the exactly-400-word limit for your final article. Title and subtitle don't count in this word count.

Now, no fair skipping ahead and just writing an article that works for everything. Rewriting is an important skill to learn. With each exercise you put this article through, you're learning something very specific. Do things in order, and you won't cheat yourself.

4. Keyword Density. Textalyser.com provides a very effective tool for examining your keywording, Pam Gaulin has a very good article about using Textalyser to analyse your text.

Your exercise: Read Pam's article. Learn anything? Good. Put your article through the Textalyser and look at what it says about your keyword density. If you have phrases that occur more often than your keyword, you need to reword some of those. If you have a lot of phrases showing up that don't have anything to do with your main topic, you need to decrease their density as well. Why? Read #5.

5. LSI Lists. Latent semantic text is a relatively new form of keywording, but it's very powerful. In essence, search engine catalogers are building word menus - relating Word X with other words commonly found in articles about Word X. For example, if you wrote an article about Lancelot, you might find words like Arthur, Camelot, sword, Guinevere, forbidden love, hero, heroic, knight, and chivalry were very commonly used in similar articles. The LSI check would look for a lot of these words when determining where to place your article. The best article on AC right now for this topic belongs to Michy. Read this, and I promise you'll understand LSI reasonably well.

There are a couple of tools you can use to help you come up with your own LSI lists. One of my reference tools is the Random House Word Menu, which lists words in categories instead of in reference to definitions or whether they are synonyms. I also like to use the expanded version of Roget's Thesaurus, but it's not quite as useful. Both of these are print reference works, not online, unfortunately.

Your exercise: A new article this time! Develop a list of at least ten related words to a primary keyword phrase. Write an article using all ten of these words and your keyword in the first paragraph, no longer than 100 words. For bonus points, squeeze them into a 50-word paragraph. 400 words total. Run this through Textalyser and see how well you did.

Exercise #2: Using the last incarnation of the first article you were working on, look at the Textalyser information. Does it appear to be put together well for LSI? If not, make the changes you believe it needs.

6. Keyword and LSI placement. LSI seems to work better if you keep your related words close to your keyword.

Your exercise: Using everything you've learned so far, write a new article; keep your LSI words very close to the keyword. Your LSI list should be about 20 words/phrases long this time, but don't overuse these words; try not to repeat your LSI words more than twice. Check this with Textalyser when you finish. 400 words total, as usual.

7. Tracking Your PVs. You absolutely must be able to track your PVs over time. This will help you determine how well your keywording/LSI techniques are working.

Your exercise: Submit and publish the article that best adheres to all the above practices. When your first PV report comes in, note how many PVs you got. Do a search yourself on Google with your keyword phrase both with and without quotes to see where you fall in a standard search. (With quotes is an optimized search for that phrase, but without quotes is how most surfers will look for an article. If you have good placement without quotes, you're in good shape.) Ideally, you want to get your article in the top 5 search returns for that phrase. Note your placement.

With your next PV report, do some math and figure out approximately how many PVs you got per day. You're doing okay if you get at least 2 per day. Good is closer to 5 PVs per day. Over time and with experience, you can increase this to 50 PVs per day per optimized article; that's significant traffic, and what you're really looking for.

Didn't make it with this article? Write another, optimize it, and track it. There's a lot of trial and error in optimization. Eventually, you'll find the right mix for you.

8. You're not done. You need to do this with every article you write until it's second nature. You don't get a diploma; rather, your reward will be in PVs and cash. Congratulations!

Commenters: Please add suggestions for these exercises! I don't pretend to know all or see all. As a community, we have both wide and deep understanding of how Google works, and how to use it for gaining PVs. Let's use that power for the benefit of all.

Also, if you have articles you've written or used that you think would be useful to others, please put links to them in the comments, with a note as to what the article is about. Advice for writers, PVs for you.

(Everyone: there are actually Useful Links here; not all are automatically generated. Read carefully.)