Latent Semantic Indexing. Part I: A Brief Explanation
For everybody involved in the SEO business, latent semantic indexing or LSI has pretty much the stature of a legend. Everybody would like to use it, but nobody is quite sure how.
So what is Latent Semantic Indexing? If you will start googling the term, you will be in for some nasty surprise. Because there truly is a nice, clear definition, but nobody quite understands it. In layman’s terms latent semantic indexing is a technique used by Google to determine the relevancy of a keyword in its context. Now that has some truly serious implications. Keyword densities are simply not enough anymore, as they must be supported by the overall text.
So how does Google define context? In principle it is quite simple. By analyzing a large number of sites that contain a certain keyword, several secondary keywords are extracted. It’s these, less important keywords that form the background and helps the PageRank system determine if the main keyword is there only for keyword stuffing or if it is dealing with a genuine, relevant entry.
It is more or less a technique that helps the search engine define more properly good content as opposed to junk and it is a technique that gives headaches to SEO marketers everywhere.
How can somebody determine these secondary keywords? How can someone use Latent Semantic Indexing for their own advantage? These are questions that will be answered in my next posts. So do yourself a favor and bookmark this site.
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[…] Latent Semantic Indexing Part I and Latent Semantic Indexing Part II George over at SEOHint wrote two interesting articles that introduced me to LSI. Personally I was never aware of what it was, and I found the articles quite enlightning. I should also mention that George wrote a guest article over at Bloggst called The Two Edges of Blog Monetization: Affiliate Marketing And Link Sales - Give it a look! […]