Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent Semantic Indexing - What Exactly Is It?
By Alden Smith

In my work as an author, I have become very interested lately in Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI. The big to-do about Google's latest damage to websites and rankings has prompted me to take a look at what they are doing. Anyone with any expectations for their articles and web copy knows that Google's ranking algorithms change constantly, and this causes a great deal of frustration and concern, especially to those attempting to make a living on the internet.

LSI is simply a system, based on the vector space model of document classification, that brings relevancy to an article. One of the biggest advantages of LSI is that it is a strictly mathematical approach, with no insight into the meaning of the documents or of the words it analyzes. Because of the scope of this article, I will leave that to your personal research.

For the layman, relevancy is simple to explain. Let us say you have a website on dog training. Utilizing the common way of thinking towards keyword density, your copy might go like this:

"Welcome to our dog training site! Here, you will find all you need to know about dog training. We will show you methods and tricks to make dog training easy. We have been involved in dog training for twenty years. See our articles and information on dog training on our website. We also have a good ebook here on dog training." Sounds like ad copy, doesn't it?