Semantics in search is evolving quicker than ever with the inevitable convergence of search and social. Search engines have been using latent semantic structure for a while to classify pages and uncover the meaning of a user’s query. However, semantics is no more transparent than it is in social content and the relatively recent indexing and inclusion of social content unveils an evolved direction from the search engines.
With keyword research as the foundation of SEO; incorporating a more semantic approach is essential and also effective to find variations and relationships of keyword groups to drive optimization and IA. Extracting meaning from keywords and additionally identifying variations to drive your SEO strategy takes time and experience. Here are 5 semantic keyword research techniques and tools:
1) Social Media Monitoring
Most marketers use some social media monitoring app to track brand or competitive mentions. For keyword research though, it’s just as valuable. We use Jive’s Market Engagement, formerly Filtrbox (full disclosure, Jive Software is a client) for ongoing keyword research. Trackur and Radian6 are 2 other popular monitoring tools.
Tracking your keywords will help to build a conversation environment and emerge other uses and variations. Jive Market Engagement is great because it shows you the conversation cloud around your terms, or terms most likely to appear with your keywords.
2) Tags
Tags are a way of classifying information, but for keyword research it’s a focus group. As users tag their social bookmarks, they’re essentially telling you how they would classify and structure your website.
Let’s use Foursquare as an example. There are over 4,000 Fouraquare bookmarks on Delicious and probably 5 – 10x as many tags (multiple tags per URL). Spending a bit of time pursuing user tags can returns some interesting results:
Geolocation, community, game, hyperlocal, ridesharing, application, geo-locator, lbs, social media, social media location, blackberry, gps, tools…
Not only can you look at tags but users’ descriptions about the domain -
“…explore their environments using cell phones.”
“…no more location updates. Yay.”
“…and also a game.”
This might be straightforward to some but for a marketer trying to position their offering, this is gold. Rinse and repeat for other social bookmarking sites.
3) Trending
Keywords rise and fall with the advent of new spaces and products. Understanding when to optimize around a rising keyword/topic is key to positioning your page in front of the storm so to speak. Here are some tools we use for trending purposes.
TweetVolume – Compare trends and popularity of keywords on Twitter.
Ice Rocket - View how often a term has been mentioned in social media over time.
BlogPulse – Automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.
Trendrr – Tracks the popularity and trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads.
4) Social Search
Sometimes, simple one-off searches can provide the most insight into semantic keyword variations and synonyms.
OpenBook – With Facebook’s new privacy settings, it’s all open. Search FB updates for keywords and connections.
Twitter Search – Search terms in Twitter mentions. Be sure to use their search operators to refine and target searches.
5) Cool Social Tools
Here are some other random tools we find useful to derive keywords from social media.
Addict-o-matic – Aggregate tool that searches sites for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images pertaining to a specific topic or keyword.
Backtweets – Search for tweets linking to any url, and setup email alerts with via the advanced search page.
MentionMap – Great visualization tool that pulls in hashtags as well as relationships between tweeps.
