The Future of Search: LSI

What is LSI?

LSI is a methodology for automatic document classification. It examines all the words in all the documents of a corpus and calculates similarity measurements for each document or for individual terms. It can gauge very accurately which documents in a corpus are really relevant to a search phrase even if that search phrase does not appear in a document.

How do search engines use LSI?

When you query a search engine that uses LSI, the search engine examines similarity values calculated for every content word. This method examines the document collection as a whole and knows which documents are semantically close or distant based on the relationships between all the words in each document and all the words in the rest of the collection. LSI does not require an exact match to the query phrase to find relevant documents.

What does LSI mean for SEO?

What this means for the search engine optimization (SEO) specialist and anyone with a website who wants high visibility in the search engines is that every word on your web page is important, not just the keyphrase(s). It is the right combination of all the words in your content that really matters here. What you do with your keyphrase(s) is still important but now you must go beyond that . . . way beyond that. You’ve got to have the right context to support your keyphrase(s).

LSI as promoting a better Web.

As an added benefit, by using LSI, search engines provide an incentive for web copywriters and SEO professionals alike to produce better content in their web pages. This, in turn, increases the quality of a search engine’s database.

Get it? Got it? Good.