Building Websites for Today's Latent
Semantic Indexing Environment

Friday, 12 October 2007

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an attempt to use automated indexing and information retrieval to return more relevant Web sites for someone performing a Google search. The goal of LSI is, in effect, to make human-machine interaction more "natural" and to overcome the vagueness associated with human language. In other words, LSI attempts to understand and recognize differences between the words and phrases the searcher actually inputs, versus what the searcher really means. As you can imagine, this is not an easy task to accomplish.
 
Prior to LSI, most search engines relied on returning results in a ranked order of relevant websites based on keywords and keyword phrases alone. Today that has changed with Google, and other search engines, and more factors are now taken into account. The LSI algorithm attempts to mimic the way a human would want a search engine to respond by giving results of quality websites containing the most relevant content. The emphasis is now quality, originality, freshness, and relevance. This is a welcome change for those webmasters and content writers who have all along been trying to build their sites on good ethical concepts. On the other hand, websites with keywords overly stuffed into the content of the site could now likely lose their rankings because their sites may no longer be considered relevant to the overall search.
 
Web developers today need to be serious about ensuring the theme and topic of their pages are clear and easy for the search engine to scan. While a site developer will need to maintain a certain density of keywords he must also add related terms and keywords into the mix so that the overall theme of the site will be well defined. The pages should also contain high quality original content and the site should be well structured. Since LSI looks at grammar, syntax, terminology, and phrases from similar websites in order to determine which website has Latent Semantic Indexing the best overall relevancy, there is now more to developing a site than just focusing on keywords alone.
 
So how do we ensure our website will obtain a high ranking? This can be accomplished in a number of ways. First, the landing page is crucial--it needs to be clear and concise as to what the site is about. Next, all the on-page content needs to match the stated theme of the website. If the site is about one particular topic be careful of straying too far away from the main theme; any irrelevant content on the site could lower your page rankings. Finally, while the overall theme and the content on your site are the most important aspects of a website today, the search engines have not discarded linking and keyword strategies completely. Continue to search out link partners from related sites but do not waste time on reciprocal linking with off-theme sites since this will cause more harm than good.

Source: http://www.latentsemanticindexing.com