SEO Tips: Use Google Sets to find related keywords

Posted on July 13, 2008 at 5:30 am

Search engines like Google and Yahoo use spiders to analyze web pages. Keywords from these web pages are retrieved by these spiders and analyzed for relevance to determine which site will come up when a search is triggered.

With this reason alone optimizing keyword usage is important. If you want your web page to be found by your target readers, you need to have the right keywords in your pages.

Most web experts already know their main keywords but are clueless when it comes to related keywords. Hey, if you already knew the related keywords then you would have put them there already, right? If you are missing a relevant keyword, it could mean a big chunk of your potential readers or customers not finding you.

This tutorial will guide you to discovering those related keywords. One way to do this is by manual research and depending on your subject matter it could take time and a great amount of resource. Also, you need to check the quality of relationship of those keywords.

Will they result to an increase of traffic on your site? Will they improve your page ranking? Assuming what we only want is relevant from a search engine’s point of view, a tool from Google Labs called Google Sets lets you enter keywords and then outputs what it thinks are related to your input. According to Google, it “predicts what other items are included in the set”.

Fir up your favorite web browser and head to http://labs.google.com/sets

I tested the tool by entering “Ringo Starr”. I’m curious if it will be able to display the other 3 Beatles members:

After clicking “Small Set(15 items of fewer)” it displayed the complete Fab Four:

At this point you might say, well everyone knows that already. Indeed, these keywords that everyone knows should be checked if they are in your keywords. You could treat these small set of keywords as your most significant keywords.

Expanding the list by click the “Grow Set” button displays all items that Google ranked as most related to your small set:

The other less obvious keywords like “Eric Clapton”and “Bob Dylan” will appear, you could treat the other keywords as your secondary keywords. The quality of the Google Set output is good. Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan came on top of other artists maybe because they are known to have jammed with the members of the band – and these events are popularly documented inside the Beatles fans’ sites.

The application of these keywords depends on your purpose. If you’re site for example wants to show famous artists influenced by the Beatles then those on the long list are a good resource. Also, if you click each of these items, it will show web pages relevant to that item – a great way to find high ranking sites where you can connect with (i.e. backlinks).

The output of the list from Google Sets is a great way for you to build related quality keywords and contents for your site.

You can also check out my first post on search engine optimization tips that explains how you use Google Trends.

Ben Carigtan is a contributor writer. He writes about websites, software and how to get the best out of them.

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2 Responses to “SEO Tips: Use Google Sets to find related keywords”

Radzster said on : July 14th, 2008 at 6:14 am

Great article
I’ve been using Google Sets for a while now, but mainly to check for slight nuances in the way Google perceives synonyms and other related keywords. Creating separate sets for primary keywords or key phrases can provide some interesting and actionable insights.