Jargon Buster: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Don't let your agency blind you with science. Alienation Digital's blog is going to war with the jargon that makes things sound much more complicated than they need to be. Here we explain Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) so that you can use it in your next meeting ;)

LSI is a system of indexing that looks to understand the meaning of a page by extracting words with similar meanings. Where search engine optimisation previously focused on repetitions of keywords, LSI scans entire documents to look for common themes, synonyms and meanings.

There is already evidence of Google beginning to experiment with ranking sites in this way. You can test this yourself by performing a search with a ~ symbol before your keyword.

Try some searches for yourself and see what you come up with, here are a couple of examples:

~Scotland: Returns results highlighting Glasgow and Edinburgh

~Apple: Look at the third page that this search returns - it's for Microsoft.

If the search engines fully embrace this method of indexing, this will revolutionise the search marketing industry. What do you think?

For the full story, and more blog articles, visit alienationdigital.co.uk