One of the biggest challenges I personally have with each site I work with is maintaining a level or organization around the development, planning, and implementation of my own and/or team’s efforts.
How many great ideas do I have floating around my desk and office in squirreled away emails, post-it notes, text files on my desktop, items pinned to the bulletin board, web bookmarks, etc.? Before a colleague turned me on to mind maps, it was a ponderous chain!
Now though, I am a highly organized developer with great ideas (and probably some not-so-great) neatly organized into a visual organizational chart (see an example here) with SEO-appropriate labels on branches like:
Landing Pages
- State specific
- Locale specific
- Community types
Linking Strategy
- Paid Directories
- Blogs
- Social Directories
Wikipedia, for the moment, defines a mind map as “a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea.”
Now you too may be wondering, “How do I, an accomplished SEOmoz denizen, get my hands on some of that mindmap joy?” You know you’re thinking it.
There are many different providers of mindmapping tools out there. I like to use an Ajax-infused service called MindMeister. It’s relatively cheap (free for just a few or $4/mo for unlimited maps) and easy to use. They allow you to conveniently share your maps with other team members who can collaborate on the map, and in true Wikipedia-style you can easily undue historical changes. You can also share view-only access with clients who are chomping at the bit for some visual confirmation that you are, in fact, actually doing something under the hood.
But, of course, there are other alternatives out there, a few of which I’ll give you below, but you can always consult the great oracle for more.
Happy mind mapping!
