Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

What is LSI?

With all of our Customer Street Industry specific directories we keep LSI in mind. LSI is one of the key aspects which search engines use to judge the topical relevance of your site and site pages. Put simply LSI refers to the inter-relation of text, sentences, paragraphs and documents.

When you write a new document (which is a genuine document and not spam!) you will undoubtedly write it with semantically similar text. To use a simple example; if you write an article about pizza you will most probably use words such as mozzarella, tomato sauce, oregano, Italy etc within the text. These words are all semantically related to the topic of the article – pizza!

When the search engines spider your website they are clever enough to pick out these related terms; across sentences, paragraphs and even pages. In doing this they build up an inventory of related topics and subjects that your site corresponds to.

LSI was created and applied to search engine results in an effort to make search results more relevant. With LSI search engines no longer have to return results based purely on the keyword used in the search. That keyword is now the key to a myriad of related keywords and terms.

By creating these associations between words and phrases the search engines can distinguish between words which could mean a variety of things. For example the word “die” could mean; die - as in death, die - as in colouring, die - as in mould etc. By looking at the semantic relevance of words in the same document the search engines are able to distinguish between these meanings.

What does this mean for Webmasters?

When creating new pages for your site you should always try to write the content naturally and honestly. In doing this you will naturally use and repeat words that relate to your site and products.

Try not to write “cheesy” sales text which means nothing – “would you like to try the best pizza in the North of England. You won’t fail to be impressed with our standard of pizza…etc …”! This kind of text contains no semantically relevant content and should be avoided.

LSI isn’t strictly speaking a ranking technique; it is more like a concept that requires the webmaster or content to writer to not think too much about the content he is adding. It is one of the many factors in the Google algorithm which has been specifically created to encourage webmasters to make high quality websites which are user focused.

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