One of the duties of a webmaster is to keep on top of new developments in the web and technology industries in order to remain competitive in the online arena. In order to really get an advantage, however, it is important to not only keep on top of new developments but to actually ride the wave and stay just ahead enough to have an advantage without getting into treacherous territory.

One of the newer developments in the search engine industry that you may have heard about recently is called latent semantic indexing, or LSI. LSI is used by search engines to provide more relevant information to the search engine customers, the people doing the searching.

Before I get into how you can use LSI to your advantage as a webmaster, it’s important to understand what LSI actually does and how it helps people that are looking for information. The key is to understand that language is not easy and certainly not straightforward. The basic premise behind LSI is that different people use different words and phrases to describe the same thing.

For example, you may call it a laptop but I may call it a notebook or a portable computer but we are really talking about the same thing. This has caused a bit of a problem for search engines as they cannot always be certain that when a person searches for something using the word laptop there isn’t much better information that uses the word notebook instead. Thus, the search engine user would be unable to access information that could be very useful.

This new technology can be used to your advantage as a webmaster, however, by simply looking at the way in which LSI needs to be implemented. The problem is that given some keyword phrase it is difficult to determine if it is supposed to mean the same thing as something else in a given context. In fact, in English there are many times that the meaning of a phrase is very context dependent. Because of this, implementations use a statistical algorithm for determining how likely it is that two phrases are the same.

You can take advantage of this by making sure that your content ranks highly for a number of related phrases. Now, this may seem difficult, but really it isn’t. The idea is that you should use a number of different, related phrases in your content so as to imply that your content is related to the context of the phrase that is being searched for.

The real problem with using this sort of method to take advantage of LSI is that the search engines are not open about how their search engines implement the actual LSI algorithm which means that you can not be certain of how exactly you can take advantage of this.

However, the added benefit of using multiple, related phrases in your content to take advantage of LSI is that you are also setting yourself up to take advantage of multiple low competition phrases so you really have nothing to lose.