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.

Talking to your web designer can be like going into a coma, and waking up in China – alone. Sure some small percentage of us can understand the way they talk. The vast majority will however feel inadequate, confused and frustrated.

Your web site’s success in supporting your objectives is directly related to your ability to communicate with your web designer. If you cannot tell them, or they cannot understand what your vision and needs are, they can’t implement it and you will fail in your mission.

5.5 easy steps to improving your chances for web success

1. Stay away from friends, family and neighbors

Developing your web site and putting a web strategy requires a lot of hard decisions and some brutal honesty. Don’t put yourself in the position where you get your house toilet papered or your tires slashed by the boy down the street’s farther – just because you did not like his son’s logo he designed for you. The exception is where these people are professional developers and part of a web development company.

2. Make sure that the developer can meet your needs

The web has become a complex world with many disciplines – search engine optimization, graphic design, web copy writing, pay per click experts, flash developers, marketing experts and usability experts. Make sure that you know who is going to do what and that they are all experienced enough to deal with the task. If not, get other experts to do portions of the job or the whole job.
Your local Chamber of Business or BNI group is a good place to look for developers and designers. You can also list your project on http://www.elance.com. You can read the article Success with eLance – Everything you need to know to get what you want to get more information on how to use eLance.

3. Educate yourself and learn about some of the terms that is a part of the web domain

You need to understand the differences between landing pages, a home page and catalog pages. You need to understand the difference between forms and flash animations, understand the terms Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Pay-per-click, keywords, search engine ranking and page titles. You do not need to know how to create these objects but you do need to know what they are used for. You can read more about this in the article Six types of web pages you need to know about.

4. Make sure that your web developer understands your needs

As your developer to state your objectives back to you. Put your needs and requests in writing. The best vehicle for this is a statement of work (SoW). You can see an example of an SoW in the white paper Making sure you get what you want, not what you ask for.

5. There is a difference between cheap and value for money

If your only criteria for selecting a web developer are cost, you are doomed to fail. Paying less for something that you don’t want or something that does not accomplish your goals is foolish and will cost you more in the long run. Rather pay more upfront for somebody with a great reputation and references than having to redo everything. Everything has a price. If you find somebody that is willing to do the job for drastically less, tread with caution and find out how they can do it. Read our White Paper Getting value for your money by staying in budget for more hints and a discussion on Return-on-Investment.

5.5 Project manage, Project manage, Project manage

Just because you are not attempting to land on Mars does not mean that you do not need to use a formal project management strategy. Measure progress, deliverables, cost and mitigate risk. Document all of it upfront to avoid misunderstandings later. If you do not have enough time to do this yourself, delegate the task or ask your employee, family member, friend or neighbor.

If you follow these few simple tips, you will increase your chances for success dramatically. Unless you are dealing with particularly evil and dishonest people, you are responsible for your own success or failure, not the web developer and designer you hire.

If you need help with anything mentioned in this article or you need a project manager for your next web project, call Great Falls eBusiness Solutions at 1-888-473-3297 (in the USA) or drop us an e-mail at article@greatfallssolutions.com or visit us at http://www.greatfallssolutions.com. The author can be reached at cicero@greatfallssolutions.com. Comments are always welcome.

Thanks to an article in WashingtonPost.com, I bumped into a really interesting donation site: http://www.donorschoose.org. This site puts materials into teachers’ hands for projects.

The teachers write up a proposal, DonersChoose verifies it, sets up the budget and publish the requirement. You can browse the requests and make a donation to the project that you like. Once the project is fully funded, DonersChoose will deliver the materials for the project to the teacher. The nice part is that you are in control of the process.

You can search for a project that interest you and give as much as you want, tax deductable and, you can rest assured that it is not a scam. Go and check it out – and give something or as a few of your friends and fully fund a project – make a difference in a teacher’s and a child’s life today.

What great use of web technology!

Sometimes the online world intersects with the off line world to provide you with a pleasant surprise.

I had a chance recently to use Google’s 411 service. I was on my way to a doctor and it started raining. Anyone living in the Washington DC area knows that the DC drivers are good weather drivers. One drop of anything and they freak out and loose it. So there I was, 3 miles from the doctor’s office, 5 minutes before the scheduled appointment time and probably 15 minutes away in the chaotic traffic.

I tried using my iPhone browser to look up the doctor’s telephone number without much success. Then I remembered reading about Google’s 411 service. I called 1-800-466-4411 or 1-800-GOOG411. Their voice response system is excellent, recognizing what I wanted over my accent and the road noise. Two minutes later they connected me to the doctor’s office – all at no cost to me. I was sort of expecting them to play an ad while I was waiting to be connected but it did not happen. I am sure that the brains at Google will find a way to monetize this service. The system did after all know exactly what I was looking for and could have played me a well targeted ad.

What a pity that the doctor’s staff did not have the same respect for me and my time. I walked in 5 minutes late to find that he was 70 minutes behind schedule – for a 10 minute appointment. A call (or text message) to inform me that I could come in 45 minutes late would have been nice!!

A description of the GOOG411 service can be found here.

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?

I bumped into some shocking data on web users and their searching abilities. I basically burst out laughing in total disbelieve.

How difficult do you think it is to use Google to do a search? If you did not see the results of this research I can bet that you do not know the answer to this question.

The research was not done by some crack pot researcher but by the well respected Nielsen Norman Group which is well known and respected in web usability circles. The people that they studies were not some back water population that still watch beta max tapes and listen to 8 track tapes. No, these people were normal people that you bump into on a daily basis.

So how many people did not even manage to find the Google search box? 24% – 24 FREEKING PERCENT!! This is not even judging their ability to formulate a useful query once they found the Google search box.

Read the text of the article here: Getting to Google is Hard. To read about how they selected the subjects for this test: User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly.

I had to go back and make sure that this research was current and not published on April Fool’s Day and rest assured, it is brand new research and published in mid March 2008.

What does this mean for SEO and SEM practitioners?

• You better make sure you know which internet browsers are the most popular and understand what search those browsers offer by default and make sure you optimize for those browsers.
• If you provide a search box on your site, make sure that it is easy to find and that you provide examples of search strings that you would like your users to use

Ever wondered where Google got the information it displays in it’s search results for a site from? I recently bumped into some information about the very subject. I found it useful as it hinted at what you can do to improve the quality of what is displayed for your site.

Since Starbucks deprived me of my favorite drink for 3 hours last night, let me pick on them. For the search “Starbucks Coffee” the following is displayed:

So where does this information come from?

Well first let me start with the disclaimer. Like everything related to Google search, this information can change at any time and it is true most of the time.

Note how the search terms Starbucks coffee gets BOLDED throughout the results.

The title “Google Homepage” is the title of the indexed web pace as found in the <title>….</title> HTML tag (<TITLE>Starbucks Homepage</TITLE>). Make sure you put something sensible in the title tag, not “Starbucks Homepage” but perhaps “Starbucks – Home of your favorite specialty coffee”.

Next comes the snippet: “Starbucks Coffee Company is the leading retailer, roaster and brand of specialty coffee in the world. The Company’s other brands enhance the Starbucks …“. This will normally taken from the contents of the HTML Meta Description tag. If this is not interesting enough or Goggle thinks there is something more interesting on your web page, it will grab this, even if it means putting it together from multiple places on the page. So the lesson is clear – Put something sensible in the Meta Description tag:

<meta name=“description” content=“Starbucks Coffee Company is the leading retailer, roaster and brand of specialty coffee in the world.

The Company’s other brands enhance the Starbucks Experience through best-of-class products, including Tazo Tea Company and Hear Music.”>

So what happens if this tag is not there or Google can’t read your web page (it may be down)? Google will consult the Open Directory Project to find some description for your business from there. So the lesson to be learned is: Make sure you add your site to Open Directory Project with sensible descriptions.

Or Google may just grab something that looks interesting from your page and put it up as the snippet.

Next we get the “Stock quote for SBUX”. Google recognizes Starbucks as a publicly listed company and adds this. If Google recognize an address for your company, it might also add a “View in Google Maps” here.

“www.starbucks.com/ – 25k -Cached – Similar pages – Note this”

Next comes the URL of the web page for this result (www.starbucks.com/) , the size of the page (- 25k) and a link to the last Google cached version of your page, other pages that Google think may be related to the subject matter on your page and the Note This which will make a copy of this result in the Google Notes application (-Cached – Similar pages – Note this)’. If you click on the Cached, you will see the date of the last Google crawl on the page.
The next section is the Site Links. These gets automagically identified and classified by Google algorithms. Google will change the link name to some standard names that it uses, for example Nutrition may be called Ingredients on your site. Google will recognize this information as Nutritional information and create the link that you see here. I have not seen any documentation on the different Site Links that Google will create and how it recognize these on your site.

Last but not the least we find “More results from starbucks.com »“. This is to prevent one site from dominating the search results. It will list only a few links and group the rest under this “More results from..” link. his ensures some diversity in the search results so that you see more than just the top ranked site on the first results page.

I hope that this throws some light on how the search results are made up and how to improve the quality of your result somewhat.