Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a search engine indexing technique used to identify relationships between terms and concepts contained in a text / content. LSI helps to find out words with similar meanings which are present in a particular content or text. Latent Semantic Indexing is playing a major role in the search industry and has helped to improve the quality of search results and is being tried to get implemented by most of the SEO agencies and professionals.
As we know that English is a language in which there are different words which have the same concept, single word with multiple meanings etc. In this case LSI makes it easier for the search engine to provide relevant search results to the users. Latent Semantic Indexing includes complex mathematical calculations to find out the relevant search results for words with different concepts or different words with the same concept.
To see the result of Latent Sematic Indexing let take a small example by taking the keyword “laptop”. Search for “laptop” by prefixing a tilde (~system) and see the results. You can see many results associated with “laptop” such as computers, Notebook, Toshiba etc in bold.
This is a simple example of how LSI works.
Google searches its huge database and when it finds that the word “laptop” and “Toshiba” are present in a large number of webpages, it comes to the assumption that both these keywords are related. Apart from this Google collects other data to calculate the relation between two terms.
There are many ways out to get the advantages of Lateral Semantic Indexing on your website and one method is to optimize specific pages of your website for relevant keywords. The different website pages should be optimized for different pages and this practice would help you in great way in implementing the LSI concept for your website. For eg. if you are targeting the keyword “used watches” you should also create separate and dedicated pages which targets keywords such as sports watches, luxury watches etc. By doing this you would be getting more relevant pages for a particular topic and the chances of listing your pages for the terms related to that topics are high.
Another way of taking advantage of LSI is to get links to your website from semantically relevant pages. If your website or webpage deals with “laptop” then always try to get links from website related to laptop, notebook, computers etc, rather than getting links from sites which are off topic.
It is also better to maintain a good site architecture such a strong internal linking, well organized content section etc. As a part of this make sure that the webpages of your website should be mentioned in the right categories.
There are some ways to take advantage of the Latent Semantic Indexing, and this can yield high results for your SEO activities.
Such a great and clear explanation.. Thank you so much..