Below is a screen shot of a search for the term Schipul. Much like the Google News search results you are now given a link to ‘Show options’

Clicking on that link opens up a few options on the left side of the screen

This will allow you to see recent content related to that term based on the time criteria. You can even sort by date or even related searches.

Ok, this is really cool BUT I want to check to the Wonder Wheel option.

Google Wonder Wheel

Oh sure its been out since May but it hasn’t shown up on the regular search page until this week. So what is Google Wonder Wheel? It is visual wheel image that shows you related search terms based on your term. Below is a screenshot of Schipul again.

Click on another term and you get another wheel

Google Wonder Wheel, Well So What?

I know you’re probably thinking to yourself ‘Well, Jason I really have no need for more graphs in my life so why is this important?’ Well I’m glad you didn’t really ask. If you’ve ever wondered what Google thinks about your site and its content this will give you a quick idea on that.

If you’ve built your site and you haven’t optimized your content you might be telling the search engines something completely different than you want. Run a simple search on your company and or keyterms and see what Google thinks is related to that. If you don’t show up your web presence might not be big enough or your site isn’t optimized. One way or the other you need to get that fixed.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com

Twitter Search is about to change. CNET notes Twitter will start indexing not just the contents of the 140 character microblogs, but also crawling and indexing the content of pages sent in shortened URLs. This will provide a much clearer indication of what people are interested in and how topics are ranking. This could be a great tool to organize data and filter some of the recent spam clutter on Twitter. Twitter may be positioning for a run at part of Google’s pie in the Search community. Delivering relevant real-time results based on rank, reputation and relevance would be valuable in the semantic search development.

What does this mean to the business user getting started with Twitter? Building a effective profile in now becomes more important than ever. Many small businesses are aware of the impact of Twitter, followers and reputation in their community. Now, reputation could be ranked and the content of websites will be measured via retweets, shortened URLs and quality vs. quantity. This isn’t anything new, we have known good content is the best way to develop followers and build a community, now Twitter will begin to follow the same rules. It is conceivable to realize Twitter accounts with good followers, retweets and good reputation will be ranked higher in Twitter search results.

What can you do? Continue to learn the best tools and etiquette for using Twitter.  For example, Twitter just switched its default link shortener to Bit.ly. Bit.ly offers real-time stats on the most clicked links, clickthrough and where users are coming from. You can link to your own website and announce new blog posts and website updates, but more importantly, share the link love to good content beyond your site and contribute to the community. Use Twitter Search to find others in your community who share similar interests. Follow them and listen, then participate in the community. Finally, monitor how well you are doing compared to others using Twitalyzer to measure Influence and other new metrics.

Jonti Bolles

For more information about this article, learning to effectively use Twitter and other Social Media tools, or learning how to manage analytics, please contact our Business Development Team at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.

All in One SEO Pack – This is the must have plug-in for your Wordpress Blog. It allows you to:

Customize title tags, meta description tags, keyword meta tags
Automatically generates meta descriptions from excerpts or first paragraph
of your post.
Allows you to have tags become your keyword meta data as well.
Allows you to have tags become your keyword meta data as well.
Solves duplicate content issues.

A couple other plug-ins that will help make Wordpress a bit more SEO friendly:

Headspace – http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/

SEO Title Tag – http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

Dofollow – www.semiologic.com/software/wp-tweaks/dofollow/
Allows you to remove “evil nofollow attribute” from your comments. Just plug n’ play.

ShareThis – http://sharethis.com/
A plug-in that will display a “Share This” button at end of your post which allows your
visitors to easily share a post/page with others. Plug-in supports both e-mail and
posting to social bookmarking sites. Just plug n’ play.

Twitter Tools – http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
Integrates your Wordpress blog and Twitter account. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Enter twitter user name and password and select options.

Subscribe To Comments – http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/ Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Math Comment Spam Protection -
http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/math-comment-spam-protection/ This plugin asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. Does require adding code to comments.php file.

This set of tools was presented by David Wallace of
SearchRank

Jonti Bolles

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

If you need help in starting your blog, the teams at Houston Web Design teams at Schipul will help create your blog site with the correct plug-ins and tools to manage your presence.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), a leading global brand and one of the world’s most trafficked Internet destinations, announced today that Carol Bartz, a veteran technology executive who was most recently Executive Chairman of Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), has been named Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Prior to becoming Executive Chairman of Autodesk in 2006, Bartz, 60, led Autodesk as CEO for 14 years, transforming the company into a leader in computer-aided design software. During her tenure as CEO, revenues increased from less than $300 million to more than $1.5 billion, and the company’s share price increased nearly ten-fold.

In addition to turning around Autodesk, Bartz’s extensive executive experience includes hands-on responsibility for leading global operations, engineering, sales and marketing organizations for large technology and engineering companies including Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation and 3M.

What does this mean for a future Yahoo/Microsoft merger? No one is saying anything yet but some sort of deal seems imminent

One thing is for sure at least Guy Kawasaki is off the hook.

For now

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

In their example on their blog they show a search result of Muhammad Ali that returns a variety of results

Hovering over an image you are given an option to ‘show similar images.’ Pick an image you like and show similar images to that image.

That’s pretty cool!

I wish I could send you a link to this but their blog provided no link to their image search function. Oh I’m sure I could find it pretty easily but I’m lazy and don’t want to have to figure it out.

So if you are listening:

Microsoft ‘Please make it easy for people to use your stuff’

TinEye Image Search

Another great image search tool is TinEye. This neat search engine allows you find similar images or what an image is by either uploading it or inputting a URL of an image.

As they put it ‘TinEye does for images what Google does for text’

I’ve used it in the past to find out what a certain image is, I highly suggest using it

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

Microsoft teamed up with Yahoo! stockholder Carl C Ichan in a bid to take over Yahoo! and completely replace(fire) the entire board of directors and the top management team.

Wow, they must have had a few too many Grey Goose martinis if they thought that one would have passed.

Yahoo! Chairman Roy Bostock had the following to say in an official release from Yahoo!;

“This odd and opportunistic alliance of Microsoft and Carl Icahn has anything but the interests of Yahoo!’s stockholders in mind. Clearly, Microsoft, having failed to advance in search, is aligning with the short-term objectives of Mr. Icahn to coerce Yahoo! into selling its core strategic search assets on terms that are highly advantageous to Microsoft, but disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. Yahoo’s Board of Directors will not allow that to happen. Yahoo!’s Board remains open to any transaction that delivers full value to our stockholders – we just do not believe such a transaction should be dictated by Microsoft and a single short-term investor…"

…After negotiating among themselves without the involvement of Yahoo!, Carl Icahn and Microsoft presented us with a ‘take it or leave it’ proposal under which we would be required to restructure the Company, hand over to Microsoft Yahoo!’s valuable search business and to Carl Icahn the rest of the Company, giving us less than 24 hours to respond. It is ludicrous to think that our Board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders”

In business speak that translates to; ‘Are you out of your *&$%@#^mind? Look we were never together. I’m with Google now, ok? You need to move on. Go buy Apple or something’

In the press release Yahoo! references its new deal with Google and refers to it as having ‘superior financial value and less complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal’

This doesn’t mean the dance is over yet. Later in the press release Yahoo! states that it ready to sell to Microsoft for the original $33 but Microsoft balked at that deal. I’m not certain but the recent deal with Google’s AdWords, that has come under scrutiny, might have something to do with it.

Whatever happens this sure has been fun to watch, sort of like Desperate Housewives for search nerds

Stay Tuned next week as Steve Balmer cuts the break lines on Jerry Yang’s Mercedes – that is a total falsehood but would make for a good movie though, wouldn’t it?

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

What is Tumblr?

Well, think of it as cross between a blog and a twitter account. Or a cross between a vlog and a micro-blog. Too confusing? Think of it this way; another great way to generate traffic to your site. How? There are a myriad of ways so lets break it down

Should I use Tumblr?

Simple answer is Hell Yeah! The long answer is yes and here’s why; it can help you generate more traffic to your site and here’s how;

A simple way is to post little summaries about your site and/or news about services or products. You can also post links to sites that you like or links to news about new innovations in your industry and your take on it.

You can also set up your account to capture traffic from other sites such as Twitter, Digg and YouTube to name a few. The biggest plus I can see for our clients is to import your RSS feeds as a Tumblr stream. Sound confusing? It isn’t. Your Tendenci site comes equipped with fully functional RSS built right in. For instance if we wanted to promote all the articles on Schipul.com we would import our articles RSS link http://www.schipul.com/en/rss/articles/ (you can easily change schipul.com to your own URL to get the same feed for your site. Don’t use articles? Maybe you post a lot of events or jobs, simply go to your RSS index page and copy the link to that particular section of your site http://www.schipul.com/en/rss/index/. Again, substitute your own URL instead of scipul.com in the previous link to get to your page.

Once you import your feed it takes Tumblr a little bit to gather that info and display it on your page so don’t get discouraged.

Why Tumblr Works

The great thing about Tumblr is you can choose to have your RSS feed as just a link or links with summaries that gives not only users a point of reference but it also gives search engines that coveted content they so desire and it isn’t considered duplicate content.

Try Tumblr out and let us know if it is helping your site

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com