Semantic Indexing (or LSI) instantly sounds complicated, from a technical point of view it probably is, but when you break it down and understand WHY search engines are using this technique it makes much more sense.
The basic principal
The basic principal is to bring the best, most relevant results to the end user and is much like writing semantically, except that you write around a theme rather than a specific word or phrase. The idea is to determine other things that your site or page is about so that when the page is indexed more accurate results based on the search can be shown.
The content you write for search engine optimisation purposes is often based around a specific keyword or phrase, but by writing about the same thing, in the same term over and over again you stand to loose some serious rankings.
If you were to write a page about a computer, chances are you are naturally going to use other terms relating to this such as ‘hardware, ‘PC’ or ‘software’.
When this page is spidered by search engines these related terms can be picked up and a link between computer, hardware, PC and software can be made, much like human would – If you were to find a page on computers but it contained irrelevant information or spam you wouldn’t read it, search engines are similar, except they wouldn’t rank it as highly in the results because it contains the irrelevant information that is not benefiting the end user.
Rankings for pages
Rankings for pages that use related terms or ‘themes’ tend to rank higher on search engines than pages that focus specifically on one keyword or phrase. If your page has a good mix of specific key phrase combined with a range of related terms the results tend to be stable.
Conclusion
When writing content don’t overuse the same term too many times on a page. Use relevant words that associate with the keyword phrase that you are looking to be found for. Your content will read far better and be more interesting too. Happy writing…!
