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April, 2009:

Squidoo Lensrank Tip: Cite Sources

Apr 28th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
1 comment

Guess what? My lenses aren't all original. Of COURSE not!

My "How to Get Your Lens Found" tutorial includes some tips I learned from PotPieGirl and Spirituality and Fluffanutta, and I used to cite Mr Lewissmile, before I decided I disagreed with some of his tricks and changed my recommendations. My CSS Codes Tutorial includes something I call CSS Kung Fu, which I learned from Glen. On baseball lenses, I've got links to forum discussions on MLB boards.

And ya know what? I thank these people for their help, and pay them by sending them traffic. It's only fair!

On a pragmatic level, those links represent a large part of the clickthroughs for my lens. Repeat after me, squids: clickthroughs boost lensrank; lensrank determines payout tier.

There are several other ways that being honest about your sources can actually benefit your bottom line. (more...)

Lens Review: EditorDave's Lens on Guam

Apr 25th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

I wasn't planning to do lens reviews on this blog, but spouting about my own stuff all the time could get dreary. So why not use someone else’s lens as an example of a good use of Squidoo?

When you find a lens you like, ask yourself: WHY do you like it? You can get insights about building good lenses, articles, and blog posts by jotting down what on that lens worked for you, what didn't. Don’t copy their content (please!), but learn approaches to presenting your own content in more effective ways.

Here is EditorDave's Guam: Where America's Day Begins lens.

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Making Search Engine Results Look Sexy, Part II

Apr 24th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
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In SEO Blunders: Very Un-sexy Search Results, I showed off my first Stupid SEO Trick! I’d decided not to worry too much about optimizing this blog, since I don't want to shell out the money for a second webhost and domain name (a URL is the best spot for keyword optimization after page title).  However, I did at least want to optimize well enough that people searching for my blog by title would find it-- all the more important since the domain name doesn’t match.

Unfortunately, I forgot one of my favorite tricks: make sure your keyword’s first appearance on your webpage is in a sentence that reads well when Google excerpts it in search results.

I took steps to correct the problem. To some extent, my corrections helped, but I still haven’t got it quite right. So here’s another quick lesson in how to shape your search engine results to make them look sexy-- or at least what NOT to do.

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My Squidoo Successes

Apr 23rd, 2009
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

A lot of Squidoo members post in SquidU when they reach various milestones. I'm too shy do that, although I'm not too shy to plug a lens when it answers a question somebody's asked!

However, for a week or so now, I've hit a new threshold that I want to toot my horn about:

18-20 lenses in the top tier, every day, and
Four lenses in the Top 100.

That's out of about 80 lenses.

I want to thank Squid Angels profusely. You're not the only reason my lenses are doing well (I hope!), but I know that the current batch of Squid Angels has been very, very actve. I've seen a lot of you stopping by some of my successful lenses and showering pixie dust -- openly or (I suspect) covertly. Thank you so much.

Finally, my Jackie Robinson lens, which has spent two years wandering around in the 20,000-50,000 lensrank range before my recent efforts got it into the 1000-2000 range, is now rank six.

I feel guilty about submitting it for Lens of the Day. But I always thought it was one of my best lenses, and I knew from clickouts it had been submitted before. With Jackie Robinson Day coming up again this year, I couldn't resist plugging it! Now, thanks to the LOTD nomination and recent traffic, that lens will finally be sending more than eight cents a month (or a bit more if someone buys memorabilia) to the Jackie Robinson Foundation.  Thank you again, everyone!

For far too much info on my Squidoo traffic, tiers, stats, see my Greekgeek's Squidoo Stats lens, which is probably pretty typical for an experienced Squidoo user who's not doing affiliate marketing.

Two More Quick Squidoo SEO Tips

Apr 19th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

Here's two easy steps I do as a quick "freshness boost" for a lens about to slip past the bottom of its tier. It's no substitute for adding new, updated, exciting content, but it's a quick fix.

  1. In traffic stats, I change the window to 30-day-traffic and add any keyword phrase to my Squidoo Tags that's been searched 4-5 times, if I haven't got it already. This won't help much with Google, which doesn't put much stock in Squidoo tags, but it may help with MSN and Yahoo (once Yahoo rediscovers Squidoo). Don't forget you need to PUBLISH a lens again after adding tags!
  2. I make note of my chosen keywords and the top 2-3 searches for my lens. I then add each as alt-tags to one image on my lens, in a module talking about that topic, or a graphic that illustrates it.  I may even delete an image, change its filename on my computer to a better keyword (use hyphens to separate words, e.g. picture-of-stork.jpg), upload it again and change the HTML to point to the new filename. Both these methods are using images to attract search engine traffic.

Voilá! Publish, and you've just updated your lens, which can give it a small ranking boost. Again, you can't always cheat like this -- sometimes you need to add new content! -- but we can't be rewriting all our lenses every day.

Links and Copyright: How to Solve Copyright Issues on the Web

Apr 18th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
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As a writer and sometime teacher, I care a great deal about copyright and vigorously reject plagiarism. At the same time I appreciate that the web lets people combine material, collaborate and build on each other's work in ways that were not possible before information and content were available instantly and on a large scale. These "mashups" can provide value and unique content that were not foreseen by the original authors. How can we preserve authors' rights while encouraging the potential of this new medium? This essay suggests a possible solution.

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"My Lensrank or Traffic Is Dropping-- Help!"

Apr 13th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

Hey, it happens to all of us. You wake up, check the dashboard, and-- eek! Traffic on lens X is going down, and lens Y is now in a lower lensrank tier than it was yesterday. I want to throw a question out to my readers: what steps do YOU take, reflexively, to combat lensrank and traffic bleed?

I'm not talking about the best steps, in theory. I'm talking about what you do, for good or ill. And consider why you do them, and whether you know they work, or you're just hopin' or have "heard it works", which a lot of us SEO journeymen do too often.

Confesssion time: here's my "flail at traffic and lensrank" list. Some of these are good ideas, some of them "here's hopin'."

This is a tweaked version of a post I made at SquidU today answering the question.

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Two Quick Squidoo SEO Tips

Apr 12th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
1 comment

I’m assuming most of you have read my Squidoo SEO tutorial, teaching you how to optimize your Squidoo page to help boost it to the front page of Google or other search engine searches.

Now, here’s two quick tips to help tweak the your SEO of existing Squidoo pages -- and give it a lensrank boost to boot!

Keywords and Alt-Tags: Match ’Em Up

Check your traffic stats and see what keyword phrases are drawing traffic. (Hopefully, they match your chosen keywords.) Copy and paste them to a spare window.

Now go edit the lens and add alt-tags to all your images. That's one of those chores we often neglect or put off. In naming images with alt-tags, keep your keywords in mind, especially those which keep turning up in searches.

If you don’t know what alt-tags are, read my section on How to Use Images to Drive Traffic to Your Lens!

Keywords: Plural Is Better Than Singular

Many search engines can find a singular from a plural (cat from cats), but not a plural from a singular. For some search engines, using the plural form is slightly better for optimization, as long as it's not an irregular word like geese tht doesn't have the word "goose" in it.

If you don’t know what a keyword is, get yourself back to my Squidoo SEO tutorial for a brush-up on search engine optimzation 101. It’s okay. There’s a lot of jargon out there; sorry I keep throwing it at ya!

Lensrank Boost?

Yep. Remember, regularly-updated Squidoo lenses receive a lensrank boost; if you leave a lens untouched for months, it drops. It’s usually better to scour the web for new quality content and link to it, and/or update your own content. But SEO  counts. After all, it’s bringing visitors.

Some Squidoo Tutorials: Navigation Aids

Apr 10th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
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Since my lenses tend to be looooong, I tend to develop various strategies to help folks navigate them. I like little inset tables of contents, "shortcuts" that jump to relevant parts of the page, or navigator bars.

So I was working on a Fancy Tables of Contents tutorial collecting my various ways of creating tables of contents, indexes, and the like. And I'm STILL working on it! *laugh* I can always make a small project huge. Then I have to find ways to shorten it.

Along the way -- partly because people are making a big push to update or build Lensographies -- I wound up spinning off one module onto its own page. So at least THAT tutorial is finished:

Build a Better Featured Lens Module

It lets you do three things a regular Featured Lens Module can’t:

  • Feature more than 5 lenses in the same list.
  • Feature lenses in a fixed order.
  • Write a blurb before and after the featured lenses without getting cut off in mid-sentence (doncha hate that?)

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for somebody to find the Easter Egg on my Amazing Nessie Photo, where I am offering $5 to the first person who proves (without any doubt whatsoever) that it's fake. Whoever does so is going to get a chuckle, hopefully.

Because a fool and her money are soon parted, and I am actually trying to teach a lesson with that lens, I will give an enormous clue:

PHOTOSHOP SEES MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE... :D

Dog Medicine Side Effects: A Plug for a Good Lens

Apr 10th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

Flowergardener is one of many, many great Lensmasters.

About a month ago she reported a bizarre case of webpage traffic hijacking. Someone's managed to divert a TON of traffic from one of her lenses to a spam webpage. Their page has NOTHING to do with her topic. I can’t understand how they did it, and I’m not going to give them an atom of link juice by identifying the site, but the spam page is still up and is still diverting traffic.

I think this is dirty and rotten and low. So, what little I can do is point links back where they belong:

Dog Medicine Side Effects

I'm a cat person, as should be obvious, but I approve of any lens that helps pet owners look after the health of their dogs, cats, or animal companions.

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