Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

[isaksson]

I did some researching today and found this article that talks about what is believed that Google is doing. If indeed Google is using LSI as the article suggests it explains much of the shuffling around of the SERPS we've all been talking about.http://www.axandra.com/news/newsletter147.htm#factsGreat link...I was just reading something very similar. It makes sense. I recently ran a search for ski real estate and found my site in the top 5 out of 7 million pages....almost wet myself I never linked to the site with that in the anchor text...and I don't use it in any of the meta tags or title...but the site is from a ski town, has a link on the front page to ski magazine. So I've been LSI'd perhaps....it will be intersting to see if anyone searches that term.Thought this was a great article and wanted to know what the other members felt about this. Seems like a pretty good idea to me, though it would make it harder for SEO's to rank for specific keyword phrases. Google has been doing this sort of thing for awhile, but it may be increasing the importance of it. Many of us are doing this sort of thing right now with our links, which can help in the long run..."Rumor in search engine forums has it that Google is giving more weight to latent semantic indexing (LSI) in its latest ranking algorithm update. What is latent semantic indexing?LSI means that a search engine tries to associate certain terms with concepts when indexing web pages. For example, Paris and Hilton are associated with a woman instead of a city and a hotel, Tiger and Woods are associated with golf.Google has been using this concept to determine suitable ads for its AdSense service for some time now. It seems that Google is now also using this concept to improve the quality of its search results.If you search for a keyword on Google and add a tilde ~ before the search term, then you get an idea of what Google thinks about a search term.For example, if you do a semantic search for phone, Google returns Nokia as the first result. A normal search for phone returns different results. Adding a tilde to the search term seems to instruct Google to do a semantic search.Why is this important to your SEO activities?If Google uses this concept in its ranking algorithm (which is very likely) then its advisable that you don't focus on a single keyword, but on a set of related keywords with your search engine optimization activities.You should optimize some of the pages on your web site for keywords that are synonymous with the keyword you're targeting.When you exchange links with other web sites, make sure that you vary the link text to your web site so that it contains different variations and synonyms of your keyword.Where can I find further information about LSI?If you're interested in the theories behind this concept, the following pages can give you detailed information:http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/ ... nition.htm http://lsi.research.telcordia.com/ http://research.microsoft.com/users/marycz/ht98.htm http://www.cs.utk.edu/~lsi/papers/index.html Latent semantic indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.Example:Instead of using SEO in all the links some of them may use phrases like search engine optimization search engine marketing search engine search engines search engine promotion etc."*cough *cough... Sorry Veto, but I beat you to it. I merged the two posts.It is a great topic but didn't get much interest the first time around. Maybe our combined posts will stir some conversation about it.I think it might explain how some of my searches for over a year have yielded some surprising results - like searches for a web design company in a city yielding results from the city goverment site that only has the word "web" on it once, no mention of design, designer, etc ... but it's directly linked from a PR=8 front page of the city's government web site.... some of these leaps of faith are down-right tenuous - so say the least!LSI is very interesting and it makes sense that a variation of it is going to become a mainstay in a search engine's functionality. There is a very interesting webcast about Google here http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=2459 About halfway through the presentation there is a section about clustering of keywords to determine a theme of a web page. I think it ties quite nicely into the concepts of LSI and it is worth checking out.ATNO,I am really behind on everything...ahhhThough its getting some good responses now Quote:I am not sure but I think this whole concept sounds fishy to me ...Google defines the tilde as a Synonym searchSo a search for ~military also returns army, navy , air force. Nothing revolutionary there, a simple thesaurus does the same trick.Quote: