There are only ten spots on the first page of Google or Yahoo!. This means that you may have to go beyond just putting your keyword on your page in the appropriate places.

If all that mattered was the keywords you got from your basic keyword research, you could just take one of your kid’s book reports and just stick your keyword in every so many words. Of course doing so won’t make your visitors want to take action. And you won’t get too many visitors in the first place because a page on your website or a post on your blog like that you won’t fool Google.

This won’t fool Google into sending you free clicks to your site for at least two reasons. Randomly splicing in words from a keyword list isn’t likely to result in a document that is grammatically correct. The second reason is Google won’t see the other complementary terms it expects to see.

(Spell checking and grammar checking are now an SEO tasks. Your website’s pages will get demerits for each misspelling and grammatical error. This may not be a major factor, but you never know what little thing will move a blog post from the top of page two to the bottom of page one.)

If you write an article about school, Google expects to see words that are semantically-related. Semantically related doesn’t just mean words that are synonymous like “student” and “pupil.” It also means words that are related like student “classroom” and “desk.”

If a first tier search engine sees none of the other words it expects to see it will assume that your website’s page isn’t really about that phrase. You can throw your links, your keyword research and your keyword list out the window if you don’t include some of those other phrases in your content.

I could use the phrase “as crooked as Nixon” in my title tag, but never get a click from Google for any search related to that person if I never use any words that are semantically related to him. (Anyone searching for information on that guy certainly doesn’t want to see this page.)

If you write naturally, you will automatically use a lot of semantically-related words. Writing for your human visitors is the best way to write for the search engines.

However just doing that won’t maximize your SEO value. You will get fewer clicks to your website from the search engines unless you also edit your copy to make it more attractive to the search engine’s spiders also.

Without using an LSI tool, you may miss some that could really boost your page’s ranking in the SERPs. I use one for most of my blog posts on my various sites.

My blog writing system includes doing a little keyword research to come up with a phrase for my title tags and my h1 tag. Then I write the post. I let my LSI tool run in the background. Then I use the LSI keyword list to help me enhance the SEO value of my post.

(I use an LSI tool that is part of a suite of SEO tools. One of the other tools in the suite no longer works and I’m more than a little ticked at the customer disservice I’ve received, so I can’t recommend an LSI tool at this time.)

However, there are several free or inexpensive programs that will generate a nice semantically-related keyword lists that you can use when you write for your site. You could generate a free LSI keyword list manually, but since the tools are cheap, it would be much more time consuming than it is worth.

What the tools do is search Google using the keyword you enter and then see which words are repeated on the most highly ranked pages.

If your keyword is “health insurance” you can expect that “health” and “insurance” are going to be on any high ranking page for that search. You might also expect that “medical,” “coverage” and “deductible” will be on all or most of the website pages as well.

“Home” and “blog” are going to be on many of those pages as well. However, “home” may be on the link to the home pages. “Blog” may be there because many of the pages will be blogs. You will have to use common sense to get the most from any SEO tool.

Generating keyword lists from a tool like WordTracker or some another keyword tool is an essential starting point of marketing your website. Everything about marketing your site starts with keywords. However, if you are in a competitive market, you will also need to use a latent semantic indexing tool as well.