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Web Analytics World Blogging Contest – entry by Eileen Trainor of Advertising for Success
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Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) are increasingly important concepts in search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO).
LSA is a statistical technique for extracting and representing the similarity of meaning of words and passages by analysis of large bodies of text. In addition to recognizing keywords on a page, LSI searches all documents in the index, looking for similar terms. Documents that have many words in common are considered semantically close; documents with few words in common to be semantically distant. This method of classification is almost human in its scope. The LSI algorithm does not know the meaning of the words, but recognizes patterns that emerge from semantically close words.
Why should you, as a webmaster or marketer, care about LSA and LSI? Google changed its algorithm and has achieved success with displaying natural search engine results, versus keyword-driven search engine results. With keywords, the search engine results will include only those documents containing these exact keywords. With Latent Semantic Indexing, the search engine results will contain documents whose content is considered to be semantically close to your keywords.
For us, as individuals, LSI has its own set of problems. Microsoft, Google or Yahoo may develop the first truly intelligent search engine. Your online behaviors and your saved preferences–as compared with users of similar demographics and behaviors–will enable extremely relevant search results. The search results will be a meld of advertisements, blogs, reviews, photographs, books, film footage, educational content sites, user-generated video, virtual tours, podcasts, moblogs and … ?
The news is exciting and worrying. As we begin to merge our online activities and preferences into a virtual representation of self, do we want to disclose this same self to analytical dissection, behavioral targeting and search engine marketing–even if the result is finding the information we want in seconds? Think about it.
