LSI SEO: Myth or Reality?
This blog entry was posted on July 8, 2008.
I received an email yesterday from an SEO firm offering to use Google’s latest methodology called LSI to Rank High. They offered to optimize to the latest LSI standard. They touted affordable rates in broken English with a response only to a Gmail account. So what is this LSI analysis and LSI SEO they are selling? Is this a new technology or algorithm?
What Is LSI?
Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a way of indexing documents based on related words and phrases. Content that includes semantically related keywords will theoretically rank better than a site that includes only one keyword and no other related keywords. As an example, an article about “pasta” would be expected to contain related words such as spaghetti, macaroni and vermicelli.
Google today is making limited use of LSI based on Title tags and some content. If you do a Google search for “ww2 guns” you will pull up high ranking results for WWII Guns and World War 2 weapons.
LSI examines the words in a document as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This is similar to how a human being looking at content might classify a document.
LSI Driven Algorithm?
Google has discussed LSI in their patents and has made limited use of it in their algorithm. Is it a major part of their search algorithm today?
The answer seams to be a clear “NO.” LSI driven algorithms are a myth… at least today. LSI today takes a tremendous amount of computing power and is a technology for the future.
There are a number of SEO companies touting LSI SEO as the answer for today. This is merely a marketing ploy. There is no LSI standard and is only in limited use by the search engines. But using contextually related words and phrases is a good idea. Most agree that LSI SEO will be a part of our future.
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