If you just did a Google search for Latent Semantic Indexing, then you already know something about latent semantic indexing. You probably know that latent semantic indexing is a key part of every Google search that is done. You may also know that latent semantic indexing plays a vital role in creating search engine optimization.
Latent semantic indexing is critical to SEO because SEO is critical to internet marketing. And nowadays, the world runs on internet marketing. LSI, that is, latent semantic indexing, is all about organizing the words and terms in a document according to their meaning, or semantic content. The reason for this is that a user who is doing a search on the internet enters a query based on the meaning of what he or she is looking for. The query is never just a random string of letters. In order to find a document which best fits that query, a search engine needs to know what the query means, and what other terms in every document on the web mean. This allows the search engine to make a match between the query and the document that is closest to that query.
So, latent semantic indexing is looking at the meaning of all the terms in a document, and it is going to be indexing them in some way. Indexing is the process of making an ordered list. If you have many ordered lists, you could be said to have a matrix of meanings. It is necessary to create a matrix of meanings for the terms in a document because words can have more than one meaning. For example, "earth" can refer to the planet we live on, or it may refer to the dirt in the back yard. Those are two very different meanings, so performing an analysis of the other words in the document will help the search engine decide which of the two meanings are more likely to be getting used in this document. This, then, is the process of finding the latent connections of the meaning of different terms in the document. When a search engine arranges these meanings in an ordered list, it is said to be performing latent semantic indexing.
The reason it is worth understanding something about latent semantic indexing is that if you are doing internet marketing, you want the documents on your web site to be at the top of a search list when people perform a query for key words that relate to your business. This is how writers optimize documents for internet search engines, which process is called search engine optimization, or SEO.
For internet marketing, you definitely want your web site to be at the top of as many searches as possible, so performing SEO on the documents at your website will ensure that this is the case. You want your documents to be a target rich environment for a search engine, so that the search engine gives them high scores via latent semantic indexing analysis. Knowing how this process works is a very useful skill for internet marketing.Know Your Latent Semantic Indexing
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