LSI technique of Google

This article made the most sense to me:

Posted by Je Dunn on: 2006-10-24 18:57:52

"Getting traffic from organic search (free search engine listings) takes time, knowledge, and skill.

Just when you think you got it down, Wham! A new algorithm change and its back to square one.

This is the cycle that many online business people face. This is also the reason that the SEO business is growing at a phenomenal rate. The bottom line is there is only two ways to get traffic. They are to pay for it, or to pay for it!

No that is not a miss print. One way or another you will be paying to bring traffic to your website, either through the time you invest to do your own search engine optimization, or by paying someone else to do it for you.

The latest shakeup in the world of optimizing a website for better rankings is LSI.

LSI this of course is an acronym for Latent Semantic Indexing.

Yes it does sound a bit scary but take heart LSI may be the best thing to happen to search engine optimization for the average webmaster so far.

Let me explain…Now I could go into how it is based on the vector space model of document classification which may impress you, but really who cares?

What you need to know is how to make LSI work for you.

The good news is even though the term Latent Semantic Indexing sounds extremely technical it really is a commonsense way for the search engines to tell what a webpage is really about.

In the old days like 2005 people would try to manipulate their position in the SEPRS by "Keyword Stuffing" their webpage's.

They would spend way too much time trying to discover the perfect keyword density that would render Google, Yahoo, and MSN helpless in not giving their sites a top ten ranking.

Google realized that it needed a better way for its bots to ascertain the true theme of a webpage and that's what Latent Semantic Indexing is all about.

The search engines through their vast databases are able to use LSI to associate certain terms with concepts when indexing web pages.

In other words instead of relying heavily on the number of occurrences of a particular keyword on a page to determine what that page is about they are now able to ascertain amore accurate assessment of a pages theme by how words are associated on the page.

Here's an example of how LSI works in its simples terms.

Through word association Google is able to tell if a page with the word "Pit" on it is about a hole in the ground or a movie actor by reading the whole page referencing its database and seeing how the combination of certain words resulted in what that page was about.

If the webpage with "Pit" on it also contained words like movie, Hollywood, Brad, Angelina Jolie, Fight Club Google will know that the page deals with the actor "Pit."

If the page with "Pit" on it contained words like Pendulum, Edgar Allan Poe, Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Horror Story, and Cliffnotes Google will know what to rank this page for based on the theme of the entire page not just the amount of times a particular keyword is referenced.

Why is LSI a good thing for the average webmaster?

Well because if you write your pages naturally about a theme keeping the users experience in mind you will have a much greater chance of ranking higher in the search engines then ever before.

LSI can really help level the playing field if you take the time to understand how to implement it into your copy."