Latent Semantic Indexing & Natural Search

[StephenR]

LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing will possibly be the most powerful breakthrough in keyword research in the last ten years.​

Latent Sematic Indexing (LSI) is based off of the vector space model of document classification?"Whoopdy Doo Stephen! That sounds incredibly exciting...NOT!"

But it is! Let me explain how powerful this is for you to rank significantly higher in the search engines (particulary Google) for natural search. Trust me, you?re going to hear a lot about this soon even though it is NOT a new concept.

Search engines nowadays are EXTREMELY intelligent. There is no denying that and Google, in particular, seems to always be one step ahead of all the others.

In the past search engines would look solely for the presence and frequency of keywords on a webpage to determine relevancy. However, since this method often results in poor results Google adopted Latent Sematic Indexing.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a novel, patented information retrieval method developed at Telcordia Technologies, Inc. By using statistical algorithms, LSI can retrieve relevant documents even when they do not share any words with a query. LSI uses these statistically derived "concepts" to improve search performance by up to 30%. - Telcordia Technologies, Inc.

A short time ago Google updated its crawler-program to accommodate LSI and has moved towards a more aggressive relevant rating list. You may remember many marketers complaining about how their site literally fell off the planet a while back. This was predominantly due to Latent Semantic Indexing.

Latent Semantic Indexing is merely ONE process within Googles complex ranking algorithm but it can affect your search engine listings considerably. LSI enables Google to understand keywords in the context of the words on your entire webpage.

An example of this would be the direct word association between IBM and ThinkPad on the same page. Catch my drift? So simple but incredibly powerful.

If you?re curious to what some of the most popular LSI keywords are to use on your website simply go to www.wordtracker.com. Register for a free trial and input your websites main keyword. Once wordtracker finishes scanning the web it will return a listing of keywords related to your main keyword located in the left side columm.

If you?ve used this service before you have more than likely seen these keywords. USE THEM THROUGHOUT YOUR WEBSITE INTERMINGLED WITH YOUR MAIN KEYWORD. These LSI keywords are directly associated with your websites main focus and will help you climb in natural search engine listings.

With the progression PPC advertising has seen over the past 5 years or so many marketers have put natural search engine marketing on the backburner. The main benefit of PPC is that with the proper research and testing it is predictable, controllable, and easy to understand. However, natural search is and always will be the undisputed champ in delivering targeted traffic to your website.

*Notice how much natural search outpulls sponsored traffic particularly on Google and Yahoo!, even with the popularity and success of Adwords and Yahoo! Search.

While PPC is still a viable marketing solution it should not be your main focus; rather an additional advertising medium when your budget allows. Re-focus your attention on natural search listings targeting LSI keyphrases and you will surely see a marked increase in your website traffic.

For more information on LSI and Natural Search you may want to review the following resources:

Technical Description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis (Boring stuff.)

Marketing Description: www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml (What you need to know!)

 

[Clickbank Hotshot]

LSI is a good algorithm for the search engines to use. the end result is that it rewards those pages that have "information rich" content, as opposed to plain keyword rich. LSI is used in part to remove the ambiguity of phrases found in documents. if you use the word "fork" on a page about pasta, then it very likely is a pasta fork you are talking about and not a fork in your decision process as to whether to eat noodles or ravioli. the more information in your document, the better the inferred relations, and the more relevant the search results when somebody types "pasta fork" into their search engine.

but LSI can be fooled by accidental semantic relationships between words. "i smoked some weed by the sea" appears in your blog and LSI connects the dots to infer that you are 90 percent likely to be talking about marijuana, and 10 percent likely to be a weirdo who puffs on kelp, and whose blog ought to be found by people seeking information on how to build bonfires out of natual seashore resources.

on the whole, though, it's a definite positive. write with clarity of meaning and the little LSI robots will help haul your pages higher in the SEs.

 

[StephenR]

LSI is a good algorithm for the search engines to use. the end result is that it rewards those pages that have "information rich" content, as opposed to plain keyword rich.

Agreed. Funny analogy too. =)