One Thing Leads to Another – Semantics

The true value of Social Media to me, as a student of the constantly evolving digital world, is that it keeps me in the loop.

I click on a link to a blog, which links to a newsletter by a guru I trust. There is a word there I don’t understand in the context of SEO. This word is “semantic”. So I Google it and find an adequate answer on Wikipedia. I now Google the word in a context based (SEO) question and find a website that teaches me something I should have known before, but didn’t.

So I write this blog, telling you about the tilde symbol “~”, which lets me find semantically similar phrases on Google for keywords which I am trying to optimise.

You just put the ~ symbol in front of a keyword or phrase, for example: “~advertising ~agency” and then Google search it. The results, as you will see in the picture below include, in bold, all the semantically similar keywords that Google identifies for this search. These can be used in blog posts, website content, twitter posts etc. to bring relevant traffic to your website through Google.

Click to View Original Size

Keywords or phrases, some surprisingly, seem to include: authority, magazine, management, design, office, jobs, media, design jobs and media jobs.


Finally to complete the loop, I now take this post and tweet about it, completing a cycle of knowledge sharing which, I do not believe can be made any better or faster unless someone invents a way to directly program knowledge into our brains.