Google's tilde search function is easily overlooked. It sounds odd, and is not an option that comes naturally to mind for most of us. But it has a powerful function that can help you build your website in a way that attracts high volumes of low cost organic search traffic to your door. What is Google's tilde function?

Just insert a tilde in front of your search keyword in the Google search box. The tilde is that wavy little sign usually up on the top left of your keyboard. It looks like this:

Now do your search as normal. What you get is interesting. In addition to the search keyword you used, Google will return a search selection also using other keywords. They are keywords that users often associate with the search keyword you chose. They are synonyms, you might say, but not in the sense you were taught in your English grammar classes. They are the other search terms people use when looking for what you searched for. Do a search on computer, and you get other words also in bold: computers, computing, hardware, PC, laptop, etc. Try Apple and you get: Apple Computer, Windows (yes, that surprised me too), Mac, computer, Macintosh, G3, G4, iMac, Quicktime, ... and no sign of fruit or apple pie before I gave up looking. Try beauty and you see: salon, spa, makeup, cosmetics, hair, and so on.

What Google is doing is trying to is be helpful. These are the related topics that it knows from the history of searches that are relevant to what you are looking for. They are terms that, together, build up a theme around your search keyword.

When Google assesses your web page to decide on where it should rank in its search engine results, one of the measures it uses is how well your content covers the topic. The more of these similar search terms that are used on your page, and on supporting pages, the more depth and relevance it appears to see in your content. It seems to pay to build around the theme, not just to focus on a narrow few repeated keywords.

Your page's title sets the primary keyword for your page. The tilde search gives you the clues as to what the search engine is looking for to assess how well your page develops the theme beyond this keyword. The more depth Google sees, the more relevant your page will be seen from a user's perspective.

And from the opposite perspective, if your page is developing its content beyond this theme, and onto other topics, Google is likely to discount the relevance of your page to the user's search. It pays to stick to the theme. If you start with beauty, by all means talk about cosmetics and hair, but keep well away from discussing computers.

If you advertise on Adwords, the quality score of your landing page also appears to be determined in part from this measure of the relevance of your content to the search term used by the users. Forget what your English grammar teacher told you about synonyms, or what your thesaurus says, the tilde search will tell you how Google sees it. And Google draws its view from what your readers are looking for. As any retailer will tell you: the customer is always right, no matter what your personal view might be. Play this game successfully, and your page will be seen as more relevant and useful to searchers, and gain in its ranking in the search listings. There lies the path to more traffic.

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