What Are LSI Keywords?

LSI keywords, short for Latent Semantic Indexing keywords, refers to words and phrases conceptually related to a main topic, once believed to be a specific ranking factor search engines directly measure.

Example

An article about “coffee brewing” naturally touching on terms like “espresso,” “grind size,” and “extraction time” is often cited as an example of using LSI keywords, even though these are really just topically related vocabulary.

Why it matters

The term LSI keywords is widely used in SEO marketing but is technically a misapplication of an older information retrieval concept; search engines have stated they don’t use LSI as a specific ranking signal. Writing naturally and comprehensively about a topic achieves the same practical result.