Dec 19 2008
LSI formatted content
In traditional document indexing, a web page or document is searched and ranked based on whether or not it contains the search term or phrase. This straightforward indexing method is quite effective, but it also leaves much room for improvement. This improvement comes today in the form of latent semantic indexing or LSI, an indexing process that has revolutionized the way websites rank in search engine results pages. Google, in particular, has recently increased its allocated weighting for LSI. Search engine optimization professionals stand to benefit much from studying and using LSI formatted content
By basic definition, LSI allows search engines to ‘read’ a page or document beyond specifically matching a search query with the page’s content. This method takes indexing further by examining the whole document collection or webpage for documents that also contains the search query and other related terms. Documents with enough words in common are said to be semantically close while those with few common words are considered semantically distant. LSI then puts extra weight on words in the content that are related to the search term and to words in other documents positioned similarly to the search query.
Importance of writing LSI formatted content
Following the logic of LSI, pages that contain words that match only a specific keyword and pages that are not backed up with related words usually end up with low rankings in search engine results page. As search engines begin to put more weight on LSI, the chances of pages too focused on a single word or phrase to rank high are seriously hurt.
To better illustrate the importance of formatting content for LSI, here is an example.
In a search for “colon cleansing,” a webpage containing only the keyword “colon cleansing” would rank significantly lower than webpage containing related terms such “colon,” “colon cleanser,” and “cleansing.” Likewise, because of the association made between the terms mentioned, pages without the actual keyword can also rank high if at least one related term is present. It is therefore imperative for SEO experts to include terms related to a primary keyword in the content of the webpage or other related pages.
Aside from website content itself, LSI formatted content is also applicable for a website’s link profile. Like web pages, links that are focused on a few phrases without due emphasis on related would not help improve a website’s rank.
More on LSI and related technologies
LSI is basically a mathematical attempt to recreate how a human user would make sense of a collection of documents, in this case web pages. It produces convincing and realistic results that it is used nowadays by most search engines in conjunction with their regular document indexing and searching processes. As such, optimizing content to LSI can help make a website rank better.
