Back in early 2005 Google introduced a new factor into their massive complex algorithm. This new factor was called “Google Latent Semantic Indexing Technology”. This technology is used to find out what exactly a page is about and works very well for words or phrases that have dual meanings that a robot would not know which meaning you were referring to when writing that page except with this new LSI technology. You will also learn how it can improve your Google rankings.

So how exactly does this LSI technology work and what does it have to do with seo?
As I mentioned in the last paragraph LSI technology attempts to find out what a site is all about especially sites that may contain or be targeted towards words or phrases which may have dual meanings. Let me explain what is happening and how LSI attempts to solve this issue.

Lets say there is a website dedicated to the study and research of Monitor warships. And there name in the title appears as “Guyn Museum of Monitors”. Now how are the Google robots or other search engine spiders/bots to know that this site is about Warships not computer monitors?

First of all what does “Latent Semantic” mean? Latent means “potential powers or possibilities” and Semantic means “different meanings of words”. So putting it together it means “Potential possibilities of different meanings of words”

So you can probably get a good idea how this technology works. The robots have to know which meaning of a word your site is all about or you may come up in a result for LCD monitors when your site is about “Monitor Warships”. This would give the searcher a irrelevant search engine result and therefore defeat the purpose of Google, Yahoo or MSN and that is or is supposed to be to provide the searcher with relevant search engine results.

To figure this out the LSI technology looks for related words on the page. If your site is related to warships you should be able to find that word on the page a couple of times. Since the Monitor warships are used for long-range bombardment that phrase may also appear. Google can then put these words together and come to the conclusion this website is related to warships not computer monitors.

Or on the other hand if the site were selling monitors the bot may find ‘lcd monitors’, ‘computer’ or other related words on the page and come to the conclusion that the site is related to the computer version of the monitor.

Now you should not take this technology as a end all factor. It will not by itself rank a site instead it is more of a factor to decide whether it should rank if other factors are in place. These include quality back links, content(LSI technology of course), anchor text in back links and relevance of back links.

This technology should not be taken advantage of instead it should be used to improve rankings ethicly. Instead of getting tons of links with anchor text ‘monitors’ maybe you should consider getting a few back links with ‘lcd monitors’ and a few with ‘computer monitors’ & ‘crt monitors’ etc etc. Use these phrases on your pages along with the targeted phrase. Instead of stuffing the page write it for the visitors and use different variances of your phrase which will have very similar meanings like the above keywords.

Again be careful not to abuse the technology. Such abuse could get you banned, penalized or at best make your site look like spam to your visitors. As I always say don’t do SEO for the search engine. SEO for your visitors. If you get thousands of visits from Google but all of them leave your purpose is defeated. So a few hits can be better than many.

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