One of the major tasks of a SEO practitioner is to find new and related key phrases (or keywords) for a web site being optimized for search engine performance. While the Google AdWords tools have many useful options to do this, Google released a new tool right under our noses to help us to do that.

Once you have done a search and have a search result page, you will see a link ‘+ Show Options’ at the top left of the search results (and the number of results on the right hand side of the same page.

When you click the ‘+ Show Options’ link, a new menu will open up to the left of your search results. Under the heading ‘Standard View’ you will find a link called ‘Wonder wheel’.

Click on this link and a new graphical view of your search terms will open in the middle pane of the search results.

It will show the current search term in the middle and related terms on branches around this central theme. Your normal search results are still visible on to the right of this graphical representation when you need to see who is ranking for that key phrase. By clicking on any of the branches the search will be repeated for the new phrase and both the graphical representation and the search results will be updated. You can also just type a new search term into the Google search box at the top of the page to update the graphic and the texts based search results.

You can click on the ‘- Hide options’ to remove the menu pane on the left and provide a wider search result pane.

Last night as the cat came racing up the stairs mieaauing at the top of her lungs looking for somebody to play with, the phrase “There is more than one way to skin a cat” came to mind. The meaning of this saying is that there is more than one way to accomplish your goals. So this morning I was wondering exactly how many ways there are to skin a cat? I consulted the yellow pages to find a cat skinner. I soon realized that being a cat skinner was probably not something you would want to advertise. So I turned to the only other source that could possibly find the answer to that question – “the Internets” or more specifically, “the Google”, Ask (I bet you that Jeeves would have been able to find me the answer back in his day), Yahoo and Live Search.

Here are the results:

Google: No clear answer but a lot of questions

Yahoo: Many ways. There is even one solitary sponsored link – which shows you how idiotic dynamic keyword insertion can be.

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Ask: Two ways and a Thousand ways. The “Narrow your search” and “Expand your search” have some pretty gruesome details!

Live Search: 50 Ways and two sponsored Sites

So my winner is Ask.com. Plenty of technical help on doing it as well as two definite answers. So let me print the instructions. I wonder if I can sell a cat skin on EBay?