subject: Optimizing for LSI - Understanding the Importance of Latent Semantic Indexing [print this page] Optimizing for LSI - Understanding the Importance of Latent Semantic Indexing
In the early days of the internet, the search engines were very primitive.
Indexing a web page was done automatically using very simple algorithms. Over time these improved a great deal, and now even the experts cannot figure out everything involved in ranking a web page.
Marketers in the early days would take advantage of the web crawling bots by simply stuffing keywords into the metatags and throughout the articles (even if they weren't related to the product or service being offered, just to artificially raise the pagerank).
Google continually evolved to combat this abuse. When you think about it, all google wants to do is to satisfy the person doing a search, and consequently earn money from PPC from the advertizers.
One of the latest new technotogies to combat unscrupulous SEO is called latent semantic indexing.
What exactly is this?
LSI is a way around the inherently inacurate "simple text," or "just synonyms" methods of returning results to a query. It overcomes this problem by considering webpages which have keywords that are "semantically similar."
For example:
Let's say that you were writing a web page on the topic of "Party supplies". As you're writing this content, you might naturally use related words and phrases such as "balloons", "streamers", "Halloween", "birthday", etc.
That's where LSI comes into play. All of those related words, those semantically related words relate to the overall topic of that web page. It is not the same thing as the plural of a word, LSI means the "semantically" related word or phrase plurals are simply "more than one".
But - be careful, because semantically related is NOT the same thing as semantically equivalent.
And Google knows this.
Another step in weighting is called "normalization." This is to remove any bias as a result of page size and will put large pages on a level playing field with smaller pages.
It is critically important to be aware of this type of indexing so that you can indeed provide valuable up to date, useful, and unique content to rise up above all of the "junk pages." Fortunately the search engines are getting more and more clever so that when you do a search on "party supplies," you won't get nonsense pages about "party girls," or some other non relevant results.
