People get worried when they hear about terms such as SEO and LSI, and when they try to find out how to use latent semantic indexing, they get even more worried when they get conflicting messages. On the one hand some say that LSI doesn’t exist and therefore can’t be used, while others, on the other hand, state that it is critical to your website’s success with the search engines.

Many people are confused by search engine optimization and LSI. What is LSI and what has it to do with SEO? In fact nothing. That’s right - nothing. Zilch. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. So why all the fuss? Through ignorance and possible subterfuge.

I am going to give you two definitions of Latent Semantic Indexing. Reason being, LSI is derived from a mathematical formula used to retrieve data and was originally used at Universities to make searching large information databases more accurate. The first definition will give you an explanation of LSI and LSA (latent semantic analysis) from the educational perspective. The second will be in accordance to how the Search Engines (mainly Google) are using LSI in their search engine algorithm to produce their search results.

Writing articles has played a major role for years now in internet marketing online when promoting products and websites. These articles were written with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in mind which meant that they targeted certain keywords by including them at a specific amount of times in the article. Optimized articles usually had the targeted keyword at 3% of the total number of words to gain the most favor from search engines.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is the new search engine algorithm currently being used by Google. LSI attempts to take a more holistic approach to website searches by employing advanced artificial intelligence to the search engine algorithm in order to mimic the way a human would search. What this means is that search engine results are based upon relevancy not upon the site having the right keywords or the most links. Sites with quality content, which is most relevant to the search terms, will end up on top of the rankings while sites with poor, nonsensical, or irrelevant content will not do so well.

The following definitions are for the most common terms found in articles written about Latent Semantic Indexing. If your goal is to rank higher in today’s search engine environment, it is important to understand the new concepts being discussed.

Google and latent semantic analysis

Rumor in search engine forums has it that Google is giving more weight to latent semantic indexing (LSI) in its latest ranking algorithm update.