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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.

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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.
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Pearls of wisdom – Back to School

So kids what have we learned in class today?

First of all, apparently its not who we know, but who knows us; suggesting that perhaps it will be more worthwhile to pursue smaller industry influencers in an attempt to promote your brand, than the industry titans who will consume your energy and time, with little promise of results – and it does come back to results, ROI and all that jazz.
Lesson after lesson, I feel like I’m back at school. Apparently businesses and people who keep going on about social media, social networks and so on, are overlooking what Brian Solis is referring to as the “world’s largest untapped social network” – e-mail. While it appears we are spending less and less time on e-mail and more on social networks, the opportunity to use those massive e-mail databases that companies have in attempt to lure clients and prospects to their SM profiles means that, if realised, companies can shift their communication from one-way to two-way, from simply saying, to engaging with clients.
So with these two thoughts in mind, my mental image of the task at hand while working for Love, is slowly starting to form.
Keep it real.