The Wonder Wheel of Google’s relations
We all know that keywords are the focus of any SEO effort. Keywords are searched for by people looking to make purchases online. When your site comes up in Google, they become your customers! This is a simple process to understand, but how do you get your site listed on Google (besides using the best sitemaps around)?
Google uses many criteria to rank pages and one major area of factors they use deals with your keywords. Are they used in links to your site? Do you use them on your pages? Are they in your domain name, URLs, H1 tags, and page titles?
Of course they are! Right? You’ve heard all of this before throughout the SEO world, but which keywords do you focus on? If you sell ‘blue bonnets’, then your choice is simple… say blue bonnet a lot, buy bluebonnets.com, and have people link to your bluebonnet.html page so that their users click on the words blue bonnet. Correct?
Simple. But since everyone is doing this, you may have to dig a bit deeper to get past your competition. What are you looking for in order to gain an edge over your competition? You want “Related Terms”. Google has an understanding of which terms belong together. You may want to mention Easter Bonnets or Fancy Hats… but which terms does Google think are related?
Enter the Wonder Wheel tool from Google! Using this tool while searching for “blue bonnets” shows a look inside of Google’s mind… Some related terms include things for flowers, musical bands, pictures and paintings of blue bonnets, and ‘facts’ about blue bonnets. Cool! After a short journey through the wonderwheel, it becomes clear that Google sees blue bonnets as flowers, not hats. so…
We search for the single word ‘bonnets’ and see a whole group of hat-related terms. It seems that focusing on the blue bonnets as a search term was putting us in the wrong neighborhood and Google misunderstood the site.
From this term, ‘bonnet’, we see that Google identifies this with the hats (not flowers) and that there are a number of directions to go in… baby bonnets, sun bonnets, rain bonnets, easter bonnets, victorian bonnets. Let’s pick the ‘Sun Bonnets’ and see where that leads us…
One thing that strikes me is that for the ‘parent term’ of bonnet, I see ‘bonnet patterns’ and for the ‘child term’ of “sun bonnets”, I can see “sun bonnet patterns”.
It seems that having a webpage called “bonnetpatterns.html” would be a very good way to rock the search engines and to promote the ‘blue’ pattern on this page!
This example took me about 5 minutes to review using the Google tool and when I create the bonnetpatterns.html page, I know that Google will come to understand that our site has to do with the blue bonnets you wear on your head, not the ones you plant in the ground.
Let me repeat this important point… Google will come to understand that our site has to do with the blue bonnets you wear on your head, not the ones you plant in the ground.
Our site will finally begin ranking for the right kinds of terms, bounce rate will drop off to almost nothing, conversion rate goes up, and the site becomes the leading sales producer for bonnets!
How do you use the Wonder Wheel? Run any search on Google. To the left of where they say “Results 1 – 10 of about 1,000,000″ is a link that says “Show Options”. Click this link and a sidebar will appear on the left of your screen. Look down the list and click on “Wonder Wheel”.
The rest is simple… click on the related terms that match what it is you do on your site, then maybe click on another term related to your site. Within a few clicks, you should have a collection of terms that help to shape your website in the eyes of Google. Their mind comes to understand that your site is related to these terms and that is where they will begin to rank your site.
If you are curious as to which terms are the most used on your website, log into your AutoMapIt Pro account and check the SEO Report. This tool lists every page on your site and which keywords are most prominent on each page of your site. AutoMapIt Pro goes even further and gives you a set of keywords that reflect your ENTIRE website.
The keywords used on ALL pages of your site is called your websites ‘keyword theme’ and has more to do with reinforcing what you have on each page. If your particular page is heavy on the “scented soaps” keyword and your site theme is leaning towards “brick laying”, then you will have a hard time ranking for the soaps. The page mentioning the soaps is considered a fluke and may not be ‘properly represented’ on a masonry website.
Keyword usage always requires a bit of common sense, but with the right tools, you can get a solid feel for what the search engines want to see and what you are actually telling them your website is about.
If your Google ranking is not where you want it to be, then reviewing your keywords using the AutoMapIt Pro System may be a very good place to start!
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