The joy of the English language – we have hundreds of words to use and hundreds of way to say something very similar. This can be very useful for marketing copy, and fortunately for we online marketers in the SEO field, the search engines recognise this. We can call this aspect of the search engines’ algorithm Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI, as use it as part of the Search Engine optimisation process.

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI has helped create more layers to the content part of the search engine optimisation. LSI is a methodology involving statistical probability and correlation that helps deducing the semantic distance between words.

"The LSI algorithm is not able to understand anything related to the meaning of a word in a document. It just goes through the formatting of particular words and deduces the correlation of their occurrences and hence their correlation with a particular framework."

In layman’s terms, this means that search engines have been learning how words are related to each other, and taking that into account when it ranks your site

When a user is making a search, they may do so using in any form: the generic name, a brand name, it may be in the plural or singular, in full or abbreviated. Therefore, if a site is perceptible for these variations, then you increase the likelihood of appearing in more search results as the semantics within your webpage content broadens. Indeed he is as human as you and me and quite capable of making spelling mistakes and obviously we’d never advise anyone to deliberately misspell words but it does mean that if a browser does, then your site’s rankings may not suffer because of it.

A simple example would be that 2 users searching on different words could quite easily get the same results, such as ‘optimization’ and ‘optimisation’, "company’ and companies’. A subtler difference would be where a webpage regarding ‘marketing’ is able to increase its rankings because of a high frequency of other keywords such as ‘media’ and communications’.

So the moral is: compose content taking into consideration all the various possibilities of a keyword.

For further information follow this link:

http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/lsa_definition.htm

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