The Google tilde operator (~) helps you uncover synonyms. This can be very useful to your SEO efforts when deciding on your targeted keywords.
How does the tilde operator work?
The tilde operator requires that you use the ~ at the end of your Google search so that Google will bold face any synonyms in the results. This can help you with your latent semantic indexing (LSI) efforts.
What is LSI?
Latent semantic indexing looks at related words and helps with the indexing of relevant websites. The theory is complex but in essence, the more words that show Google your site is relevant to your subject matter, the better chances you have of getting indexing for targeted keywords in your niche.
Some SEO experts pay great attention to LSI and some do not. It does stand to reason that you should at least consider it in your website optimization efforts along with other approaches such as Long Tail keywords.
How do I use LSI and the tilde operator?
When deciding to write articles or site content, look up synonyms in your niche and sprinkle those keywords throughout your text. This way, when the search engine spiders crawl your site, they’ll see relevancy in your pages and consider you to be an authority on your subject matter. This can get your more rankings for keywords as well as more traffic when people go looking for information on a particular subject.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2012
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow – great tip. I have been using whonderwheel to find long tail keywords but never thought about using synonyms in a post. It’s easy to do and probably also helps to improve readability for the visitors. Great tip, I will include that in my future keyword research!
Hmm interesting.
Is this better than MS or do they do the same thing?
Hi Gee,
I think MS would have to be the best.
Hi Sean,
This is something I haven’t considered but it seems like it would be very easy to implement. If using synonyms helps make my pages more relevant for my keywords in Google’s eyes, then I’m all for it. It’s really worth doing.
The use of the tilde (~) in Google searches is something that I just learned about yesterday from another of Sean’s blogs. My wife was quite excited about it as an addition to her search tools. I gained brownie points there.
Latent semantic indexing will give you much more flexibility in achieving readability of your articles when your worrying about keyword density because of the search engines recognition of synonyms.
Well now I just feel down right ripped off! I don’t even have that squiggly line just (-) on my laptop
The Google tidle operator (hey there’s a squiggly line under the word tidle and it is even red and all) is yet another site I have never heard of but it certainly sounds interesting as an extra reference to use with MS.
Well you learn something new every day! I just had to go and try it and how exciting is that! Thankyou for that little gem just to help everything else along a little easier.
It seems to me that Google likes a concentration of similar words to the keywords we choose so obviously the tilde is going to be spot on to use.
Thank you for that information. The more I can do to get my blog ranked higher the better.