Any of you who run a serious Google AdWords campaign will know about “keyword grouping”, but this is also an important concept for your “natural” search optimisation too. In AdWords, you may be advertising against hundreds of keywords (search terms) but you need to organise these into groups so that you can link them to appropriately-worded ads and landing pages. Similarly, it’s impossible to build a separate page on your website optimised for every search term you hope to rank for in natural search results. So you need to organise your key search terms into groups, and develop a web page for each group. This may actually focus your mind on a good information architecture for your website visitors too.
A couple of intriguing new keyword tools from Wordstream are worth a play if you’re exploring this. They’re called the Keyword Niche Finder and the Keyword Grouper. One takes a list of keywords and provides related terms already organised into groups; the other organises an existing list into groups. Of course, in the sort of niche technical areas which most of us operate in, what these tools can do is limited. But it’s still fascinating stuff, at least for data anoraks like me.