April 27th, 2008
What’s All This Talk about Google and LSI?
The latest buzzword in the search engine optimization world is Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI for short. Google and the other search engines have been incorporating LSI into their search results algorithm’s for quite some time now. The reason that google and lsi is so important to the future of search and search engine optimization is that the LSI algorithms attempt to predict words and phrases should be included on websites that have authoritative content. For example, a website talking about golf, will no doubt mention the names Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, as both Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are phrases that are closely related to the theme of golf. One can hardly speak about professional golf without mentioning these two top players.
LSI algorithms predict what words should be appearing on websites that are relevant to what the searcher is searching for. So a searcher who types in "professional golf" into the search engines will more than likely get back results that include their main search phrase "professional golf" as well as phrases related to professional golf. So if you’re an owner of a golf website and you don’t include related phrases such as Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, the search engines will deem you less relevant than golf websites that do include those phrases. This is what LSI (in a very simplified form) attempts to do.