11b. More SEO Factors: LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing (Don’t be confused. It’s so simple)

      People, who are involved in SEO, get worried when they hear about LSI – Latent Semantic Index, and when they try to find out how to use latent semantic indexing, they get even more worried when they get conflicting messages.

      LSI does exist, but not in the form that Google would have us believe, and not in any form that you can use to make your website ‘LSI compliant’. Anybody claiming that they can do that are simply playing Google’s trick and using big names for what is a very simple thing to do.

Latent semantic analysis is used by Google primarily to detect spam, in respect of excessive repetition of keywords in order to fool the search engines into providing a high listing for that keyword. There was a time when smart people could indeed achieve this simply by writing a meaningless template with rotating synonyms into which any keyword could be multiply inserted by means of software. Thousands of pages could be generated in minutes, each targeting a different keyword. Some were making thou$ands daily from Adsense using this method.

In fact the principles of LSA to determine the content of web pages were used by a small company called Oingo that changed its name to Applied Semantics who developed a search system to determine the relevance of page content for specific advert placement. They called this Adsense. This company was in turn bought by Google in April, 2003, and Adsense used to replace their own system which was still under development. Adsense, then, was not developed by Google, but purchased by them.

Your web page content is now analyzed by the statistical mathematical analysis tool known as LSI and indexed according to the meaning of the words in your text. It goes further than just checking for the excessive use of specific words, and no longer searches only for indices of your stated keywords. LSA informs Google of the true meaning of your text, and you cannot hide this by repetitions of a single key phrase. Let’s call it LSI because that’s what Google calls it. LSI analyzes the character strings in your text and compares them to a large database of words, the meanings of which have been defined.
If you write naturally, as you would if you were talking to somebody, and trying to explain your subject, then you will not have any problems with the LSI algorithm. There is no need to use an SEO expert, since they are not necessarily qualified in their knowledge and use of language. A thesaurus will do the job fine.

However, in the way that it is used, if you use good vocabulary, contextually relevant to your keywords, then you will also be using good SEO. How to use latent semantic indexing properly is irrelevant in pure terminology, since you can’t use it on your web page. Google can use it in their algorithm, and you should make your vocabulary as understandable as possible by means of simple words that express the meaning of your text.

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