What is Latent Semantic Indexing?
LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is a complicated term with a
simple explanation. The main concept behind Latent Semantic Indexing is to
discover words and phrases that are related in the context of any document or
group of documents. Search engines, Internet Marketing Professionals, and
Website Designers often use LSI in their day-to-day activities.
Latent Semantic Indexing is the discovery process for finding
related terms and phrases. LSI is a mathematical equation that will fold words
into a matrix for analysis that will draw out semantically related terms. This
equation relies heavily on the context in which any given word is used. For
example, if the term “flat tyre” is used in a document, some semantically
related terms would be: car, vehicle, repair, wheel, tyre pressure, and wheel
brace. You can see that all the words in the list are related to the term “flat
tyre”.
The Inner Workings of LSI
The actual work of Semantic Indexing is very complicated and can
only be performed by computers running specialised software. These computer
programs will build a word and document matrix and run a semantic analysis and
output the semantically related terms. These related terms are commonly known
as LSI terms. These programs can analyse one document or a group of documents,
one website or many websites.
How Do Search Engines Use Semantic Indexing?
Search engines, such as Google, use Latent Semantic Indexing as
part of their search analysis, when trying to decide what websites will show up
in their search results. The goal of every Search Provider is to provide the
most relevant results for any query. For example, if a user searches for the
term “flat tyre”, Google must decide what websites or documents are most
relevant and display them in the search results. LSI plays a key role in what
is returned on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Why is Latent Semantic Indexing Important to Me?
As teams or individuals create content for the Internet, there is
often an overriding goal to have this newly created content found by the search
engines. To do this, they need to use the terms that are the most related and
relevant to their keyword or phrase. If I fix flat tyres, I want to be found
for flat tyre repair in my city or town. My internet marketing success depends
on the search engines finding my web content and showing that page in the
search results when someone types in the query “flat tyre repair Galway”.
What Do You Do If YOU Don’t Have Time To Work This Out Alone?
Well, that’s easy. We help our clients to develop strong keyword
strategies and then we can assist them in building great content that is LSI
centric. After all, if you are committed to improving the ranking of your
website, you’re going to be working on new content all the time, right? Why not
work smarter rather than working harder? Allow us to guide you on the science
and let the science drive your creativity by providing focus on the things that
matter most.
