I have been thinking about and working with keywords for quite a while but I have never been really big on keyword lists per se, they always seem too limiting because they, too often, do not reflect what people actually do.
Anyway the following post is about a way I found to develop keyword lists that were a reflection of the use and thoughts of ‘real people’.

We are moving away from simple keywords as being the definition of our sites and content. To be honest I have always felt that humans are much more intelligent than a simple keyword list gives credit for.

So we are seeking a way of associating what people are thinking with the language they use to express those thoughts when they are using the internet as an interface to our websites -yes?

And we are learning that the systems are mightily more complex than we frst thought, but even now we try to distill that complexity into simple systems - themes, silos etc.

Anyway, I was playing with my the plugin I have been using for my automated WordPress blogs - the automated blogs.
At the same time I was looking at a coupleof my original autoblogging experiments that led to the automated blogs format - I had built some sites that I called ‘meta search sites’ and then monetised with Adsense.

One of the sources for content that I experimented with was rss feeds from social bookmarking sites such as Del.ico.us and Furl where I made a custom rss feed from searches on keyword pairs.
The script did its thing and I then got a whole load of links, most of which did not contain the keyword pair in them. But all were on the theme of the keyword pair.

Hmmmm…..???? Thinks Andrew.
All of these links are here because people thought that they had an association with my keyword pair - and in the search, but not the feed, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of the buggers. How can I use this. You see almsot all the tags that are used to identify posts are done by humans, of course there is a little noise from automated bookmarking systems but it seems to be quite small and the larger social sites work to keep the noise level down.

It seemed to me that if I could take these RSS feeds and do some (as yet unspecified or considered) analysis on the words coming out I could get a picture of the concepts people connect with my keyword and the words/phrases they use to describe the concepts.
Does this make any sense?
For now I simply do analysis by hand, item by item. It opens up one’s eyes to see the strange ways in which folks’ minds work.

So, now I have a basic, free and simple tool that gives me lists of keywords that people associate with my initial keywords - lists of word synonyms and more importantly THOUGHT synonyms.

To get the same effect one simply makes the custom rss feed and put the URL into one’s rss reader. The nice thing is that the output consists of little more than the title of the post and the link itself saving a laod of work of reading.

It seems to me to be very neat to be seeing how real people see the conncetions between my search terms and the greater themes.