I’m only going to touch on this briefly here. There will be a much larger article about LSI on our website at http://www.be-a-wahm.com.
LSI is really beginning to come to the forefront of website optimization. It’s not an unknown term but it is not widely known. Without causing your eyes to glaze over, it’s simply a way the search engines read your page and understand what your webpage is about.
A good example is “bark” Is your site about the “bark” of a dog or the “bark” of a tree?
Search engines have their own ways of discerning this and we’ll get into it further on our website but suffice it to say that there are certain ways you can write your webpage so as not to confuse the search engines as to what your website is about.
All right, if you’re interested in learning more, check out our web page about it.
An by the way, just in case you are interested, these words are also called homographs.
so, this LSI that I keep hearing about is just having similar words on your page?
Isn’t that already the point of writing the page in the first place?
Comment by kccharlotte — September 8, 2006 @ 8:01 pm
Hi kccharlotte -
Well, yes and no. If you are naturally writing for your product and service then the words that you would use within the article will obviously have a tendency to describe that product so you would think that your article would be sufficient enough to describe to the search engines what your topic is about.
However, it is vitally important that you use words that cannot be confused one way or another. If we stick with our example about “barK’ WE know that the article is about a dog’s bark. The search engines do not know that yet.
If we add the word “tree” do the search engines know that the article is about a dog’s bark? Probably not, they have now associated the word “tree” with the word “bark” so they may have a tendency to think that we are talking about the bark of a tree. However, we may be talking about a dog barking AT a tree.
We need to further associate the word “bark” by using words that are directly related to a dog’s bark. You can do this by visiting WordTracker and by doing a “Keyword Universe” search on the word “bark” or “dog bark” and see what words come up. These can be extremely helpful.
This should help claify things for you a bit.
Kristine
Comment by Kristine - A WAHM — September 17, 2006 @ 9:51 pm