I would say Alex, but I don’t want to get sued. Still, Latent Semantic Indexing is a great topic that I want to go into a little more. While not as advanced as a $500 question/post, we are going to go a little beyond the basics that you have seen elsewhere. You should expect that from Lease a SEO, however.

 Basics of LSI for Content

In the past, to some, LSI is a myth (or even BS) when it comes to SEO, but to me it always made a lot of sense. As with any tool in the SEO’s arsenal, it can be overused or abused, of course, but it is a good way to get variations on content while staying on topic and theme.

LSI stands for latent semantic indexing. According to the Latent Semantic Analysis Project at the Colorado University Boulder website, “Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text.”

Basically, it is a way to compare documents (web pages) and see while are similar. The data can also be used by search engines to analyze and categorize web pages. Google used LSI for Adsense when it first appeared years ago. Since then, the debate over whether LSI is used or not for organic search results raged for a while in the blogosphere. Today, it’s known that it is used (at least in part) in creating Google and Bing SERPs.

Back to the Future for LSI

The thing is, LSI has been around for a while. In fact, even before the Internet we know today it was being bandied about as a means to categorize and access texts and documents on computers. While some say that LSI cannot scale to the size needed to use it on the Internet, if any company could pull it off it would be Google.

In 2009, it was announced that Google search was semantic.  Times were changing in the SEO world (as they always have), but the speed of changes began to leave some of the players (Internet marketers) unable to keep up. Additionally, many started to look at LSI as the magic key (along with keyword density of 1.24%), and this was a bad thing for them.

As you may or may not know, Google uses hundreds of “signals” to rate web pages and rank them in the SERPs. Additionally, they are constantly rolling out changes to their software and bots to stay one step ahead of the SEO crowd – all of them good and bad. Because of this, relying on just LSI as a magic bullet isn’t a good idea.

Related Words & LSI Technology

The Charlie Rose of SEO (Aaron Wall), has a great post on Latent Semantic Indexing. In it, he goes over the definition. He also shares some insight on how it applies to Google.  The post linked was from February of 2005, but it still contains a lot of good information that is relevant today. (This may be one reason that it is ranking so high for terms related to this topic.)

Also be sure to check out his Patterns in Unstructured Data, which is a very easy to read summary of Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. Wall is very good at not holding back the punches when it comes to reporting about Google and what they are doing in the SEO world. At the same time, he knows what he is talking about and any research of latent semantic indexing should include him!

LSI silo structure

Over at Noble Samurai, they have a good write-up on LSI. They define LSI Silo Structure as, ” …categorising content in a logical keyword structure, and grouping content on similar topics together, in a way similar to what search engines expect to see.”

They also go into debunking myths about LSI. The thing is, even they’re not sure whether or not the big G uses LSI for finding the best organic search results. When it comes to the SERPs, Google has been pushing more and more organic space “below the fold,” making a top listing even more important for some.

This is why I think LSI is a good thing for your content and can help give a quality signal. However, it is not something that will work wonders all on its own.  Still, something like a LSI silo structure for a new site (or a site redesign) sounds like a great idea to me.

LSI in 2011, 2012, and Beyond…

If the world does not end in 2012 as the Mayan’s and others have predicted, there is a good chance that LSI will continue to play a role in SEO. While it may not be the holy grail that many seek, there is a good chance that using it will help make sure you are following other “good ideas” when you are putting together websites and also fine tuning them for better performance. Latent semantic indexing may not be the holy grail or magic bullet that some hope it will be, but it helps build a solid foundation for any website or long term SEO campaign. (Notice I said longterm SEO campaign. Spammers usually work hard to get a top spot but fall quickly as their method or technique becomes copied and loses its value…)

If you have any further questions about LSI or SEO in general, feel free to leave a comment below and we will get back to you with an answer or at least another way to look at the problem. Whether you have had success with LSI or still think it’s a myth, we’d love to hear from you. Drop your thoughts in the comment box down there and let us know.

Stay tuned for more…