Latent Semantic Indexing Concepts
Posted by Bruce in LSI Articles, tags: latent semantic indexing, search engine optimization
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a new concept that Google has began to employ and pioneer. It was originally used in Google’s Adsense program, as a way of seeing which adverts would be the most relevant on a particular site. Google recently bought a company called Applied Semantics, in an effort to use LSI concepts and ideas in its search rankings, and many other search engines are beginning to follow suite.
What LSI is, in basic and non-mathematical terms, is the ability for the search engine to search for websites on the internet the same way a human would. In other words, the search engine looks for relevance and quality, rather than just keywords or links going in and out of the site. Keywords and links were the way the search engines used to do things, which was known as PageRank, but they found that this had a number of weaknesses. Firstly, webmasters or SEO ‘experts’ that cheated would come on top, by simply loading a site full of irrelevant keywords, writing shocking quality, or using link farms extensively. Many sites would just produce further links to other irrelevant sites, all to sell the site itself and make money from traffic or Adsense. The old PageRank system therefore penalized perfectly good sites – sites with good content, or that added content too quickly, or that were new – as it relied on links, votes and keywords. Most internet users have been the victim of many irrelevant sites from search engine top rankings, and so the search engines have been trying to do their best at getting these sites off the rankings to create a cleaner and higher quality internet experience.
Looking at LSI in more detail, it’s easy for us to begin to see how to structure and build our web pages correctly. LSI’s algorithm works by scanning your website for keywords, and then comparing relationships between these passages and keywords. It does this by scanning other websites that have the same keywords (or concentration of those keywords) and finding relating words and phrases. LSI goes so far as to also check grammar, terminologies, spelling and the like on sites already indexed and your website. Basically, what it is doing is checking the overall theme of your website, whether it matches what the user is searching for, and how it ranks to other sites in terms of keyword relevance. The most relevant site wins.
For example, if you search for “cellphone” on a search engine using PageRank, it will display sites that have the highest mention of “cellphone” or links pertaining. But under LSI, a search for “cellphone” displays results of sites that also have the word “mobile phone” or “cellular phone” or anything else that is relevant. What this means is that keyword stuffing into sites and articles will not win you a higher ranking, but quality, relevant content will. Website developers and writers who have been doing website optimization on good ethical and sound quality principles now finally come on top, while irrelevant and rubbish sites are thrown off the rankings completely. The better the quality and relevance of the site, the better the performance.
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