The Google Wonder Wheel

When you search for something on a earch engine, you also get results of pages which are closely related to the word you searched for even if they don’t contain the actual word.

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, i.e. not just the spelling but the way humans understand words. For example “buy” and “purchase” mean the same.

As humans we know these words are the same, but how do search engines work this out?

There is a concept called “Latent semantic indexing” or LSI which allows a search engine to understand what a page is about by referring to a database of semantically related words.

However there is some debate about whether Google actually uses LSI or some other word or phrase co-occurrence technologies. Either way, it is a fact that if you have related words in your web pages and use “themes” in your website you are more likely to rank higher.

Google has a great free tool called “Google Wonder Wheel” which shows you search terms related to the main word you are interested in, and allows you to explore relevant search terms which you can include in your website.

To use the Google Wonder wheel you simply need to do a search… Then click the “Show Options” link on the navigation bar.

Google Show Options Link

Then on the left navigation you will see many different ways to refine your search. One of these is Wonder Wheel. When you click on this you start with your main search term and the words which google understands are related to it. In this example we started with “bags”. Clicking on “gym bags” opens another wheel with words which are more closely related to gym bags. You can keep on refining the niche to reveal the best words to use on your site if you want to build a theme around a certain topic.

Google Wonder Wheel

This short video shows you how to use the Google Wonder Wheel

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