Question

Topic: Copywriting

Tags, Meta-tags, Categories, Meanings, Synonyms...

Posted by telemoxie on 3/25/2013 at 1:31 PM ET 1500 Points
I have been reviewing and analyzing a body of information, and I have identified hundreds of possible tags or meditags or topics or categories of information. The problem is... some of these may be synonyms, some might even be misspellings, and I would like to find a way to group the 500 or so most common tags into categories or classes with similar/closely related meanings. I know that there are tools which will count the number of unique discrete elements... but are there any similar tools which group and characterize and Meanings?
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  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 3/25/2013 at 3:32 PM Accepted
    Can you share a sample of what your data looks like?
  • Posted by Moriarty on 3/25/2013 at 3:34 PM Accepted
    I haven't come across anything like this. Computers don't really do "meaning".

    How is it that you arrived at so many disparate tags? What sort of website/copy has led to there being so many different ways of describing what they do? It sounds terribly confused to me - and that is not the sort of thing a copywriter should be producing. After all, even with a whole raft of products, they can still be tagged in a way that characterizes the business. That in itself leads to self-categorization of a sort.

    I have a hunch that looking at this from another viewpoint might help. We would need to know more.
  • Posted by SteveByrneMarketing on 3/25/2013 at 4:00 PM Accepted
    This seems like software that could be available in the relatively near future (at an "affordable" cost and with a user-friendly interface). Here are a few links that may be heading in the right direction, but not sure based on your information so far.

    https://stackoverflow.com/

    https://www.filebuzz.com/

    https://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Artificial_Intelligence/Machine_Learning/Sof...
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 3/25/2013 at 7:12 PM Accepted
    The issue with vast numbers of search phrases is one of taxonomy: the forming together of clusters of related search terms that you then drill down into.

    You do so in order to create tighter and tighter niche groups, sub niches, and to collate terms that are similar—but that have major differences depending on who is entering the search terms into the search engine. It's for this reason that misspellings—and variations in misspellings, although seemingly of no value, DO have value because they account for change variations and knowledge fluctuations.

    Most keyword lists are just that: lists. From them you'll be able to see variations in how many searches there are for specific terms, over what period, and from which region or nation, but not much more. Knowing which key phrases are searched for is one thing; knowing which sites rank
    for those phrases, and quite how those sites are viewed by search engines (to thereby add to their ranking capacity) is another.

    You can have all the great key words and key phrases in the world for any given niche BUT ... and it's a big but ... if you've no chance of ranking for those keywords within the first two to three pages of the major search engines (and ideally, being on page one), even the best key phrase won't help because it will be difficult to rank for those terms.

    What's the answer? Stealth and subterfuge! There are a few essential tools that you can use to rank (and rank well) for certain key phrases within any given niche, two of which are paid resources (and which I'll happily share with you off forum), and one that's mostly free: Quantcast.

    Although Quantcast isn't a key word tool as such, what it does do is offer essential intel into the way sites are visited. Of the two resources I'll share off forum, one I use in tandem with Google's key word tool on a regular basis because it gives essential ranking data. The more you know which sites you have to outrank, the higher your chances become of ranking for given key phrases.

    Trying to rank for key words and phrases that other sites have sewn up because of the structure of their linking and page rank is a fool's errand. The other service is one I've not used, but about which I've heard good things. Get in touch for further details.
  • Posted by mgoodman on 3/25/2013 at 8:16 PM Accepted
    Depending on what you want done, I do know a taxonomist who may be able to help. If you contact me offline I can put you in touch. If she can't help you she may know someone who can.
  • Posted by telemoxie on 3/25/2013 at 10:15 PM Author
    thanks very much for the comments, they are all helpful. I'm trying to find a way to group related words and ideas. For example, the words "commission" and "salary" and "bonus" and "benefits" are related to the big idea of "compensation".

    Of course, the word "benefit", for example, has multiple meanings, making the exercise challenging.

    if you would like to get an idea what I am looking for, take a look at www.visualthesaurus.com

    that website attempts to show a graphical representation between the meanings of words. It would be possible to do the same on a much larger scale. If you imagine a network containing all the words in the English language, each with links to related words, and you could input a file containing words and the number of occurrences (e.g. commission (8); salary (4), bonus (7), benefits (2); compensation (9) ) it would be possible to create a "heat map" which would graphically display the meanings of words and their relative occurrences and save me a lot of time.

    Unfortunately, there probably is no such program commercially available.

    I will almost certainly need to create my own hierarchy (e.g. comp_comm; comp_salary, comp_benefits, comp_compensation). However, I figured there was at least a chance somebody has already done this.

    Thanks again for all your input.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 3/26/2013 at 12:52 AM Accepted
    It looks like Synaptica can do this (https://www.synaptica.com/products.html), but at a yearly fee of $1200
    The current theme of "Big Data" is likely to be fueling the need for such taxonomy tools, since they'll need to better group the data for analysis.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 3/26/2013 at 6:16 PM Accepted
    Try: https://www.zenya.com it's one of the resources I alluded to.
  • Posted by SteveByrneMarketing on 3/26/2013 at 8:27 PM Accepted
    Gary has done it again ... zenya.com has an interesting "category" story of its own. Check out this review:

    https://searchengineland.com/zenyas-next-gen-keyword-categorization-platfor...
  • Posted by telemoxie on 3/27/2013 at 12:51 PM Author
    thank you everyone. It seems that what I am looking for is categorization and compartmentalization.

    For those who are curious, I'm writing a book on sales and marketing. More details later.

    one of the big challenges facing me is that I want to organize a large volume of information from multiple sources. That requirement stimulated this question.

    Another challenge is that I want to be sure that I am adequately covering the most important sales and marketing topics. It would be handy to have a robust and comprehensive organized breakdown of tasks and ideas and topics which relate to sales and marketing. It would be possible to assemble a very large list of topics by gleaning information from tables of contents and indexes from sales and marketing books... but this would still require me to create my own categories.

    Thanks again for your help. I am closing this question, but I am submitting a new question: looking for a source of sales and marketing topic categorization and or compartmentalization.
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