What is Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI, is a relatively foreign term to anybody who doesn’t know much about internet marketing or the science of keyword content and keyword research. Latent Semantic Indexing is a revolutionary new way of indexing documentation on the web, causing search engine rankings to change as the relevancy of many of the documents on the web is changed somehow.

Google is the largest user of LSI when it comes to their search engine. Back in the day, search queries had to be rather specific if a user were looking for a specific type of information. Now with LSI in place, the relevancy of a given document to a user search is determined by examining the content of it in relationship to other terms that are usually found with that phrase. For example, a user searching for information on airline tickets might receive documents with related terms in the content such as airplane tickets, plane tickets, cheap plane tickets, and airfare tickets. These terms are similar in nature and meaning and many times they may sound or spell somewhat similarly, so the search engine picks up on them as related.

LSI allows those in search of information on the web to receive not only the exact phrase that they are looking for but content with relevant information to that phrase. In essence, LSI is about smart internet searching.

When it comes to LSI, functional words like ‘the’ are disregarded by the search engines. As a matter of fact, Google even prompts a note to the user explaining this, letting them know that it is unnecessary to even include it in a search query.

How does LSI impact the internet? It makes the old idea of precise keyword content seem frivolous and has taken search engine rankings and keyword research to a whole new level. It now takes more than plain old keyword-loaded link farms to get the most profitable attention from big names, and Google is the biggest name of them all.

While the benefits and drawbacks of LSI being adopted as the primary method for search engine rankings for Google are an issue in itself, all are not in agreement as to whether or not this change is convenient. For the users, the adoption of LSI by major search engines means that when they put in a search query they will receive much better quality results in return. For website administrators and internet marketers, it means having to change the way that content is created in order to attract the attention of search engines and gain valuable and profitable internet traffic.

To properly understand Latent Semantic Indexing one must have some working knowledge of the internet, keyword research and the science of search engines. Nevertheless, it is an important factor in the way that we receive information the information that we need from the web every day.

Niche Mania has a great tool I use to help rewrite PLR content called LSI Mainia. This tool truly help rewrite keywords in a document in a more natural LSI format.