The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

Have you been to Google lately? (Who hasn’t, right?) Everyone seems to be talking about the new search item they call the “Wonder Wheel.” It puts me in mind of a couple of tools online. One is Personal Brain, which is mind-mapping software, and the other is Visual Thesaurus that will help you to brainstorm keywords or really just find synonyms if you’re a writer. Pretty neat, both have limited free versions that are worth checking out.

But what does Wonder Wheel do? It helps you to expand your horizons. When you do any search in Google, you’ll see a link above the horizontal paid ads, just under the Google search box, on the left-hand side of the screen that says “Show Options.” When you click on that, a right-hand sidebar opens.

You’ll notice that you can choose videos search, forum posts, or reviews. You can also decide how old you want the listings to be.

But the links at the bottom are the ones you want to pay closest attention to. The first link is for related searches, but the second is for the Google Wonder Wheel, which when clicked, opens just to the right beside the search results. You’ll see that circling the center search (what you typed into the search box,) are related terms.

For example, if you search for “search engine optimization,” you’ll see terms like “search engine submission,” “meta tags,” “search engine optimization pricing,” and so on for other terms related to SEO. When you click on “search engine optimization for dummies,” another wheel opens that’s linked to the original wheel, and you get new stuff to think about, like “google universal search,” “major search engines,” and “xml sitemaps.”

Pretty sweet. This can help you develop a pretty broad keyword base for any niche that you’re pursuing. That’s great for SEOs and Internet marketers, but it’s great for just plain searchers because it helps them to really get where they want to go. For example, if you click on XML Sitemaps, it takes you to places where you can learn what they are and to generators that will prepare them for you.

Anyway, it’s a cool new tool and you should check it out. It can be very valuable for your business or help you to search a whole lot smarter.

Yesterday, I advocated the idea that you should always use a sitemap on your blog to be sure that all your permalink pages are indexed.  But what is a sitemap and why is it so important?

A sitemap gives search spiders information about your website. It tells the bots what pages are on your site, when they were last changed and when it’s likely that they’ll change again. Search bots love information that updates frequently, and it’s part of the reason why spiders love blogs. If you’re blogging consistently, and using keywords associated with your niche you’ll find yourself in the results pages pretty easily, providing you’re not competing for terms that are uber competitive.

Sitemaps also give spiders information about pages that they might not discover otherwise, which is great, and sitemaps allow you to prioritize your pages, if you want to do that.

The bottom line is that they just provide more information and make it easier for spiders to crawl your site. The easier you make it the more likely it is that they’ll discover everything that you want them to. If you’re using flash, or Ajax for example, having a sitemap is mandatory. Otherwise, you might lose the opportunity of having your page crawled at all because spiders find information in those formats hard to parse.

Having a sitemap doesn’t totally guarantee that your page will be indexed, it just increases the likelihood.

Sitemaps are easy to create, whether for a blog (get Google XML Sitemaps plugin) or a website.  Just go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ where you can set priorities, and the dates/rates of change for your website. Then, take the file and upload it to your root directory via FTP. It’s really simple.

To make this more powerful, you should have a Google Webmaster account. It’s free to set up, and when you do, you give it the URL of your sitemap and you’re all set.  XML-Sitemaps.com will index up to 500 pages for you for free. It’s a great deal. Totally take advantage of it.

If you read this blog, you know that I think what Jeff Johnson does is pretty interesting. I’ve watched scores of his videos, and have always planned to do something with all that knowledge. He’s a powerhouse of an affiliate marketer, and I need the time to find a niche where I can rule. Time is the enemy in my world. Anyway, I think Jeff is a pretty smart guy.

So, today, I got about 6 emails from him. (I think I’ve joined his list at least a dozen times.)

He was advertising this new SEO-friendly plugin for WordPress. Pat is all eyes.

I went over to his blog and read more about it. What it does is find plugins for you that are important to your blog’s SEO profile, and it tweaks the settings to match Jeff’s. I thought, hmm… I need to check this out, just because — SEO and all.

I downloaded it.

I let the blog install it and activate it from the zip file. No problems.

It was pretty happy with me because I already have most of the plugins Jeff recommends, but there were a couple, like the CAPTCHA code plugin for comments, which I had mused about but never installed, and the Google XML sitemaps. I had the plain Google Sitemaps, but hey… If Jeff wants to give me his settings, I’m going to download the right plugin, eh?

Once I had them all, I told Jeff’s plugin to change the settings, and bingo! I’m 99.96% optimized.

I had to go in and change the number of posts to show setting because he had it at 5. It left a bunch of white space at the bottom of the blog, so I changed it back to 10, hence my not perfect 100%. Oh well… Not changing my theme. Sorry.

The drawback?

Well… You have to agree to allow Jeff’s blog feed to sit at the top of your dashboard. To me, this isn’t a big deal. In fact, it’s kind of a blessing. I read his blog anyway, and now, I can come here and read from here. Nifty.

I’d recommend this plugin to you, especially if you don’t know what plugins or what settings to have to make your blog SEO-friendly. Two caveats…

First, you must be using WordPress 2.7. You should be anyway, but don’t use Jeff’s plugin if you don’t have it running now.

Second, not all plugins work with all themes. If you install it and something goes glitchy, just deactivate the plugin. Or worse, if your blog goes away, just rename your plugins folder and it will come back. then, delete the plugin and you should be back to normal again.

With those two things in mind, it’s a great free tool. I’d check it out: http://budurl.com/jeffj