Accidental Keyword Optimization and Latent Semantic Indexing

Several weeks ago, I took a class on the internet about Latent Semantic Indexing, and since then, I've been discussing this with many web content writers and web developers, of which I am both a writer and web developer. There are so many people who don't understand how Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) works, and how that can affect people who write web copy or build websites for search engine optimization.

Latent Semantic Indexing is relatively new on the keyword optimization arena. This technology, which is used almost exclusively by Google at the moment, is an automated way of trying to compete with the new trend of live search sites. Live search sites came about because many ordinary internet surfers have had trouble using Boolean search strings to find content on the internet.

Too many people have gone to Google or another search engine or directory and they type their query in and then receive hundreds of thousand or even millions of returns for the search, but when they start clicking on the search returns, while they share the same keywords that were typed into the query, the results don't contain relevant information to what the searching was browsing.

For example, prior to LSI being used, I wrote an article entitled How to Utilize Keywords and Keyword Density. This article will help you clearly understand how keywords affect the way search engines and directories index your information when it is published on the web. The article is still valid, so I encourage you to read it if you need help with keywords, but more than that, I want you to see how LSI has changed the face of keyword writing and relevancy on the internet. You can right click on that link and open my article in a new window so you can follow along with me.

Back to the live searches now. Live searches were a great idea, in that they took a group of people who were trained in how to search for information that was relevant to a query on the internet and then those people would do the searching for you, and return only results that were relevant to your query.