The last time I searched for Key Words in Google, Google Adwords came up as the number one result.

What does Google have to do with Key Words?

It is interesting to see how a company like Google latched onto the idea and now use it in their marketing, tools and business model.

In case you wondered how Google makes money when they give away the best search engine for free, they do this by selling advertising space.

If you want to place an advert on Google’s Adwords, you first need to decide what market you want to target. Google uses Key Words to help you decide what words to use in your adverts. By understanding the Key Words that people search on, you will be able to place a better advert and reduce your advertising budget. Your advert will target the correct people, as they are searching for the Key Words that you are paying Google for. This is what niche advertising is all about.

It is amazing how thousands of searches on Google for a particular topic all contain the same Key Words. This shows how the brain actually works when categorising information. It reduces whole thought patterns into a number of simple Key Words. The top Key Words therefore cost the most money.

As a user of Google, the better you understand Key Words, the better results your searches will yield. If advertisers, Web designers and Bloggers are all targeting Key Words, wouldn’t it therefore be wise for you to also search by Key Words? Having the correct Key Words can save you hours of search time to get to the right information.

Key Words and Mind Maps

While Google uses Key Words to help people build a marketing campaign, Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mind Map, tells us to use Key Words when creating our Mind Maps.

Most sentences contain many words not required for understanding or recall. The words are there for proper sentence construction and to make the written word ‘flow’ so that it can be read more easily. But once you have read the information and you want to record the information for later recall, normal sentence construction is actually a hindrance rather than a benefit.

Paragraph Structure

When constructing notes or Mind Maps for later recall, understanding paragraph structure is a good idea.

Most paragraphs can be broken down into a main, and often, a secondary idea. Once you have the main and secondary idea for the paragraph, you can reduce it into Main Key Words and Secondary Key Words. In the beginning, this will often be a Main Key Word Phrase and Secondary Key Word Phrase.

I’ve found this to be more difficult than it looks. We have been using full sentences in our notes for so long, that it is quite difficult for us to change. In my article on Mind Map Principles, I state that Tony Buzan’s ‘one word per line’, is the rule I break most often when Mind Mapping.

How to choose Key Words

In ‘Use your Head’, Tony Buzan advises you to choose good Recall Key Words. He differentiates between Key Creative Words and Key Recall Words.

Key Creative Words are what he calls ‘evocative‘. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary describes evocative as ‘evoking or tending to evoke an especially emotional response’. While the Key Creative Words trigger imaginative responses, it does not help with recall.

If you were to pick up a Mind Map with only Key Creative Words a few months later, you will find that you can build a completely different story to the original one. In fact, you won’t be able to recall the original from the Mind Map even if you wanted to.

To solve this problem, you need to use Key Recall Words. Key Recall Words are words that trigger recall of the original concept or idea. It funnels back the original images and thoughts once triggered. These words tend to be a Strong Noun or Strong Verb. They are sometimes supported by additional Key Adjectives or Adverbs.

According to Tony Buzan in ‘Use your Head’, Standard Notes have the following problems when compared to a Mind Map with Key Words:

• Time is wasted recording words that have no bearing on memory. (estimated time wasted – 90%)
• Time is wasted re-reading the same unnecessary words. (estimated time wasted – 90%)
• Time is wasted searching for Key Recall Words.
• The connection between Key Recall Words are interrupted by words that separate them.
• Key Recall Words are separated by time. It often takes a few seconds to get from one to the next.
• Key Recall Words are separated by space by their distance from each other on the page.

My experience with Key Words

I’ll end this week’s article with my experience of Key Words, as I feel it has some bearing on your ability to apply the above.

My experience is based on teaching people how to take proper Mind Map notes and also by producing Mind Maps for others to use without my help.

I found that my normal, Key Word, one-word-per-branch Mind Maps were often unreadable by another person without my help. If I took the person through the Mind Map and explained each branch to them, they would understand it at the time, but a few months later, they could not understand the Mind Map.

The problem obviously lies with me. Even though I’ve been using Mind Maps for about twenty years, I still do not always choose good strong Key Recall Words when Mind Mapping.

I do a lot of writing, as you can see, and also create a lot of Mind Maps. Often, not enough thought is given to the Key Words to ensure that they will trigger the correct recall. To overcome this, I tend to use more supporting words in addition to the strong nouns and verbs that serve as my main Key Recall Words.

I’ve found these Mind Maps to be more ‘reader friendly’, as they have more of a supporting structure for reading. I often tell students, like I am telling you now, to redo the Mind Map in their own words and summarise my Mind Map into Key Recall Words of their own choosing.

Doing this will ensure that you will be able to recall the material much better and also allow you to personalise it with your own thoughts and ideas. That is when real learning takes place.

So, to sum up, learning how to summarise using Key Recall Words will not only save you time, it will also enable you to create Mind Map Memory Maps that trigger recall perfectly.