It’s All Semantics: How Latent Semantic Indexing is Changing Google Search and SEO

We here at Sun Sign Designs have lately focused on general topics and techniques to assist your company’s marketing. The reason for this is that it is essential that you have an understanding of how the fundamental concepts work together before delving into the more technical aspects of web presence. Today we’re focusing on one of those technical pieces: Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI. This feature of Google’s search functionality ties directly in with one of our previous content topics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it is critical to understand how LSI affects SEO in order to fully maximize your company’s online offering.

One of the simplest ways to describe LSI is to point out what it’s not, or to be more specific, what it’s replacing. For many non-marketing professionals, SEO is synonymous with Keyword Density, the easily exploitable system where the number of times a certain word is mentioned on your website will affect the location of your webpage rank in search results. While this may have been effective back in the early days of Google’s world-conquering search algorithm, using keyword density is no longer a viable option, as Google has phased out its use due to its contribution to inaccuracy for results.

LSI is the system that takes Keyword Density’s place. It groups words together into semantic systems, letting Google know when the related words on a website speak to a specific search. It’s best to show in examples: say you’re searching for Rolling Stones. Google knows that “Rolling” and “Stones” combines together to form the band name, and will avoid giving you results of rocks rolling down hills, even if that happened to be randomly trending at the moment. If you’re searching for an Oracle Developer, Google will know that you are searching for someone developing an Oracle database and not landscapers for ancient Greek monuments.

LSI does the heavy lifting for a user’s searches, connecting the informational dots, allowing Google to give more pertinent results for its visitors. So how can you capitalize on this new system? Content, as usual, is king here. Having high value content in every corner of your website will allow you to stand out among the crowd so that Google can use its LSI to your advantage. You look at your website and see well-made content—Google will see it as the brightest Christmas tree on the block when all the semantically related content relates with each other, catapulting your site above the rest to the top of users’ searches.

That last description doesn’t have to be an exaggeration for you—it can be a reality! Google prides itself on finding high value content, so it’s a triple win for Google, its users and your company if you have that kind of content on display for its search to find. Reach out to Sun Sign Designs today so we can give you all the technical knowhow of how LSI can help your business come out on top!