What is LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and how it helps SEO

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LSI (not to be confused with LSD) is the latest trend in content marketing. If you want to know what LSI is and how it can help your website’s SEO, read on.

What is LSI
As you may have already deduced from the title of the post, LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. What does this mean and what does it have to do with SEO? Well, technically LSI is a mathematical method of document retrieval and indexing.

A method for retrieving and indexing documents, eh? That sounds a lot like Google, and that is indeed where it is headed.

Google is dedicated to crawling the Internet in search of new web pages to add to its database. A process called indexing, which is carried out by its faithful Googlebot. Then, when an Internet user does a search on Google, the engine has to search its index to find the most appropriate pages to answer that query. In this whole process, Latent Semantic Indexing has become especially important.

LSI means that when deciding whether a page is relevant to offer as a result in a user's search, Google looks at whether it contains the keyword and also synonyms and terms related to that word. This is band database as semantic richness.

For example, if I search for information about the flu, Google will consider pages that contain the word flu and other terms such as symptoms, illness, winter, etc. to be more relevant.

This method helps Google to classify all the documents in its index much more accurately and, therefore, offer better results in your searches.

How does LSI work?
Imagine two pages that talk about cats. But one talks about cats as animals and the other about cats used in mechanics to change a wheel. Thanks to LSI, Google can classify both contents correctly. If the page finds words related to the automotive industry such as cars, workshop or wheel, it will know that the page is talking about mechanics' cats and not about animals.

How SEO influences LSI
It's clear that LSI has a lot to do with creating content with SEO in mind. Nowadays, it's no longer enough to repeat the keyword like a parrot so that Google can say, "Okay, this page talks about this."

It is still important to include the keyword in the content (especially in the title, URL and first paragraph) but you should also take the trouble to include synonyms and related terms. In short, lexical richness that will not only help you rank for the original keyword but also for a lot of related terms.