One of Google’s Engineers posted an entry on the Official Google Blog yesterday explaining some of the technologies behind Google’s ranking.

It’s an interesting post in general but I wanted to highlight one paragraph in particular:

Another technology we use in our ranking system is concept identification. Identifying critical concepts in the query allows us to return much more relevant results. For example, our algorithms understand that in the query [new york times square church] the user is looking for the well-known church in Times Square and not for articles from the ‘New York Times’. We don’t just stop at identifying concepts; we further enhance the query with the right concepts when, for instance, someone looking for [PC and its impact on people] is in fact looking for [impact of computers on society, or someone who searches for rainforest instructional activities for vocabulary] is really looking for rain forest lesson plans. Our query analysis algorithms have many such state-of-the-art techniques built into them, and once again, we do this internationally in almost every language we serve.

As you can read, Google talks about “concept identification”. This is a less-fancy word for Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA).
The examples Google provides are wonderful examples of LSI at work.
As you’ll probably know by now, if you want your pages to rank well you should have most of the keywords in [rainforest instructional activities for vocabulary] on your page but also have “rain forest lesson plans” as an anchor link for example to one of your subpages (or as inbound links from external pages).

Remember you can identify 90% of these LSI-keywords through my KeyWord Excavator tool. If you’re not familiar with my tool yet, be sure to check it out as there’s no sign-up and no download required. Oh it’s free to try too! KeyWord Excavator: LSI KeyWord Research Software Tool