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.