LSI: What is the Rocket Science behind it

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is an indexing and retrieval method, which uses a technique called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). This method is used to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts which are present in a completely unstructured collection of text or words. Terms or words which are used in the same contexts mostly have similar meaning and LSI works on this principle.

The main feature of this LSI method is its ability of extracting the conceptual content from the text of the body by establishing appropriate connections between the terms appearing in similar contexts.

Sounds too scientific and so the thought might come to your mind so to how is it connected with SEO. Lets try to understand this in terms of SEO. LSI can be explained as a method which allows search engines to decide what a particular web page is all about just by using the keywords which are used in the content of that page. For example a webpage for seo would contain terms like adwords, organic traffic, link building and so on. Words or terms for a particular topic come under the same umbrella and search engines have started associating such similar terms on web pages.

Relation with Internet Marketing

There was a time somewhere around 2009 when LSI was very hot topic in all the search engine marketing related groups. As it has been the case with search engines especially in last one year, companies have been trying to evolve the search engine algorithms and crawlers to make these more and more intelligent. Also make them to think like humans because it is the humans which would be using search engines.

For this purpose the search engine giant Google is speculated to integrate LSI in its algorithm updates to spot the unnatural link webpages present on the internet. There was a time when it was necessary to integrate the keyword in the webpage and also include it in the majority of the inbound links.

Since April 2012 when Google started coming up with various algorithm updates especially Penguin update the sites which had link profile heavy for the targeted keyword or query were affected badly. Thus LSI comes into the picture. As it plays an important role in avoiding such scenarios where a single keyword would negatively affect the site.

Experts at SEO firm in London believe that Google now shows results which include a wide number of keywords relative to the search queries which are inserted by the users.

Thus considering LSI seriously and varied link profile should be adopted. For this the site should be linked to with closely related synonyms to the main keyword. Then the site would be ranking for wide range of terms. Thus this would increase traffic, sales, revenue and will keep rankings improving.

Avoid having numerous links from the same type of websites or some non relevant website which is not related to the topic of your site. This will improve the site from search engine point of view.