• Google: about 1,340,000 from squidoo.com (This was in JANUARY. In June, it is about 398,000! Mayday! Mayday!)
• Yahoo: Pages (9,671,276)
• Bing: 446,000 results
• Altavista: found 9,660,000 results
• Lycos: 1,107,211 results
• Ask: 222,500 (? — I’m not sure if I figured out how to query Ask properly.)

Again, I don’t think Google’s spiders are less effective than Yahoo’s — no WAY — but it tosses an awful lot of pages into the “suppemental index” if they seem not to give any good info that can’t be found on other pages on the same website. I.E. if you make a lens that’s just like a ton of lenses, don’t expect it to get seen in Google search results!

To figure out if your lens is indexed, use one of the searches above, then add the title of your lens!

This URL has 1000+ links from 6 domains.

• angelfire.com 1
• annbrundigestudio.com 20
• digg.com 1
• mythphile.com 25
• squidu.com 952
• squidutils.com 1

(Once again demonstrating the  limitations of social media for SEO, since the links from StumbleUpon, Del.ici.ous. Tagfoot and others don’t show up.)

1000+ backlinks is pretty good, right? Well, yeah, assuming (a) all search engines see the same backlinks as Yahoo Site Explorer (the database SquidUtils uses), and (b) all search engines count those links as relevant. But of course, they don’t.

Checking my Swoosty SEO Tools Firefox Add-on…

(Pagerank 4, not bad, could be better…)

Links according to Google:

• 40, of which 36 are other Squidoo lenses, 4 on my Mom’s blog.

Digg doesn’t show up. That ancient Angelfire site I’ve had since the dawn of the web isn’t listed. More troublingly, my blogs started 8 months (this blog) and 2 months ago don’t count, even though Google indexes their new posts within an hour.

Note that Googling for link:http://www.squidoo.com/lensname may not does not give all the backlinks that Google considers relevant for ranking in search results. I know Google search results occasionally turn up SquidU posts, so it’s seeing those signature links. [EDIT: Fluff explains why Google's link: search doesn't show all the links Google knows about.]

But this test is a sobering wake-up call that using Yahoo tools to count backlinks for Google optimization purposes is like using a German dictionary to translate a French menu.

Okay, it’s no secret that I am better at on-page SEO than backlink-building. But my “Free Web Graphics” lens (and the blogs mentioning it) are less than a year old. How about…

Test #2: A More Established Lens

Ancient Greece Odyssey is a less-searched topic, but it’s been around since May 2007. It’s got pagerank 5 instead of 4, for what little that is worth.

SquidUtils backlink checker:

• This URL has 595 links from 64 domains.

That’s half the number of links, but 10 times the number of different domains.

Google link checker:

• 28 links, of which only TWO are from non-Squidoo pages, but they’re my older blogs which are relevant to the lens topic. Surprisingly, one of those links was from Livejournal, which I don’t often hear of as a good blogging platform for SEO purposes, whereas only my older WordPress blogs showed up (the ones 2 and 8 months old didn’t, though Google indexes new posts on them promptly).

Among the Squidoo pages that Google’s link: search turned up as links pointing to my lens, I notice a few things:

• Some but not all of my lenses turn up. I am stymied as to which lenses get chosen — they’re not all highly-ranked, they don’t all many backlinks, and at least one of them is old, stale, un-trafficked, and hasn’t changed much since 2007. Hm.
• Lenses with links to my lenses in Plexos did not turn up. I wonder whether Google demotes big lists o’ links.
• Lenses with regular updates tend to get listed. If you haven’t built a “Latest Ten Lenses” lens, do it now.
• The Squidoo tag page for the PRIMARY TAG was listed.
• Other Lensmaster profiles with Ancient Greece Odyssey listed FIRST under Favorites turn up.  Checking Webconf’s Spider Simulator,  it looks like Google may be giving extra love to the first link on a webpage after the header links.

Edited due to comments: As Fluff points out, just two examples isn’t a big enough sample size to let us draw any sweeping conclusions. And the link: search delimiter doesn’t tell us which links Google recognizes as backlinks for SEO; it just shows us “here are some pages that link to yours”.

But it does at least suggest that a good primary tag and links from other Squidoo lenses may help get your lens seen by Google. When you’re looking for places to build links to your lenses, I would start with lensrolling, featured lens modules, careful choice of the primary tag, and embedding links to your new lens  in the body text of your other lenses.

But a fishing hook isn’t enough to catch a fish. Even if you get to page one of search engine results, you still need your “hook” to stand out from all the rest. What kind of bait should you use to attract a click on your link?

Look at this example:

Something jumps out when you compare these search results.

The FIRST example tells the reader exactly what’s on the page. It has energy and pep!  It says “FREE STUFF for you,” always a draw. And it includes the keywords right in the title and opening sentence. The only thing it’s missing is a Call to Action.

The SECOND example begins with a friendly but generic “Welcome to my webpage” message. Courtesy is a fine thing, but it’s too generic for bait. Any webpage on any topic could start, “welcome to my webpage.” Skip vagueries. Get right to the point and say, “Come and get X and Y on this page.”

The THIRD example is a little hard to read — evidently there’s a logo there with some image alt text right at the beginning — however, it manages to get  hard and compelling fact into a very short snippet: “90 Free Squidoo…” something. Clip art graphics? Who knows. Maybe if they’d sacrifice the alt-text for that image they could fit the free whatsit in before the snippet breaks off.

Stepping back from the example, here’s some general guidelines to help you “bait your hook”.

1. Include your keywords in the opening sentence, showing you have exactly what someone is looking for (this also helps with SEO).
2. The sentence must be well-written, proving you know what you’re talking about.
3. When possible, the sentence should include a Call to Action, or at least build the reader’s enthusiasm and expectation.
4. The webpage title — the link — should include both keywords and something that tells the reader, “I’m what you need/want.” “Easy Kite Making” is a good search term. “Easy Kite Making: How to Build a Pyramid Kite” tells the reader they’ll be getting a step-by-step guide. See the difference?

You can’t always predict what excerpt people will see in search results. Sometimes they’ll land on your page searching for a term that’s halfway down it. But you can refine your introduction, the opening of your webpage or lens, to make sure it looks sexy. You can make sure that the first instance of your keywords on your webpage is in a sentence that’s compelling, informative, and phrased to attract clicks.

What is the character length for search engine results?

Maximizing the blurb served up by search engines helps you bait your hook. How much bait can you use?

Google search engine results show about 130 characters for the very first page on a domain that matches a search query, then they will either list just ONE more result for that domain, again with about 130 characters, or TWO results, with only 75 characters each. The example above shows three results.

This example shows just two results:

Yep, there’s an SEO blunder in result #2! I’ve fixed it, but of course, it takes a while to get re-indexed.

The third place to worry about is Squidoo search results. What do people see when your lens shows up in search results, tag pages or featured lenses modules?

That’s about 195-200 characters.

Finally, the Featured Lenses module gives you a generous 250 characters:

So what?

Craft the first 128-130 characters of your introduction with extreme care. That’s for Google. It’s best if you can get something catchy and/or keywords within the first 75 characters. Use the next 80-100 characters to engage your reader even more in Squidoo search results.

This takes practice– I’m still working on it myself. Check your search results now and then to see how they look. If you haven’t made maximum use of the blurb Google or Squidoo is giving you, try rewriting for brevity and punch.

“Bait your hook” wisely wherever you’ve bookmarked, plugged or promoted your lens.

So when you check your traffic stats tab on a lens, what good does it do to see which search phrases people used to get there? Newbie lensmasters often think they should add them as tags, but in fact, that may not be helpful.

Instead, I recommend using that data to apply SEO techniques manually. In this post, I’ll walk you through an example to show you how.

Example Lens:  Egyptian god Thoth

First, I check its traffic stats and set the range to three months, so I have a long span to help identify trends. (Short term is more relevant on seasonal lenses). Here’s the lion’s share of hits for that period:

As you see, I’ve added the two most-common long-tail search phrases to my tags, but not two slightly less-common search phrases, “Egyptian trickster god” and “thoth in hieroglyphics”. Should I just ignore them? Nope!

Search engines determine the relevance of search phrases on your webpage by analyzing several factors. We don’t know all those factors or how they’re weighted, but SEO experts have identified some of the main ones: page title, URL, keywords in description, section headers, link (anchor text), filenames of graphics, and body text.

My goal for today is to examine my lens and see if I can better optimize some of those factors on my lens to focus on the phrases “Egyptian trickster god” or “thoth in hieroglyphics”. The challenge is to do it without interfering with any existing SEO. My example is an old lens I made before I understood much SEO, so it’s very likely I’ll find ways to improve it.

Let’s take the second phrase, “Thoth in hieroglyphics”. Where does it show up on my lens? Right in the introduction, which carries some weight in search engines:

The phrase match isn’t exact. I’m betting Google’s synonym algorithm is smart enough to figure out that “hieroglyphs” and “hieroglyphics” are close enough. But I can’t be sure all search engines are that smart, so why not make it easier for them? Plus — a real SEO expert would do months of testing, but I’m a lazy lensmaster — I suspect that an exact match for “hieroglyphics” may rank better than a not-quite-match with “hieroglyphs.”

Therefore, I rephrase it: “Here is Thoth‘s name in Egyptian hieroglyphics.” I trimmed the wording to get the keywords closer together, although I decided after some thought to keep “name” in there since some people might use that term in their search. (Not many have, but you never know.)

Next, I check my graphic to make sure it’s targeting keywords. Here’s the sourcecode:

<img align=”right” border=”0″ src=”http://www.istad.org/thoth/name.jpg” />

WHAT?! “name.jpg” isn’t descriptive at all, and I’m not taking advantage of an alt tag to get my keywords in there!

On the one hand, the URL has the possible keyword phrase, “Thoth name,” which might land a few hits. On the other hand, it hasn’t gotten any, and that’s not the only place the phrase appears on my lens. So I’m going to assume that it’s just not as juicy a phrase as “thoth in hieroglyphs,” which is somehow landing me hits even though I didn’t use quite that wording! So I rename the file and add an alt tag:

<img align=”right” border=”0″ src=”http://www.istad.org/thoth/thoth-in-hieroglyphics.jpg” alt=”Thoth’s name in Egyptian hieroglyphics” />

Notice that I upload images to my own server using a folder name that matches my keywords. That’s another invisible way to boost SEO. Also, I managed to keep “thoth’s name” in there

Now, how about optimizing for “Egyptian Trickster god”?

I notice that my header for that section just says, “Thoth the Trickster God.” Nobody’s been searching for that exact phrase, so I change it to “Thoth the Egyptian Trickster God.” Also, I tighten a convoluted sentence — “The Egyptians loved Thoth so much partly because he was a trickster god” — to a more straightforward, “The Egyptians also loved Thoth as a trickster god.” There’s still five full words breaking up the keyword phrase, but at least they’re closer.

While I’m at it, I find that the graphic in the “trickster” section isn’t pulling in any keyword search traffic with its filename, so I rename it egyptian-trickster-god.jpg and add an alt-tag.

The great thing about image file names and alt-tags is that human users don’t see them, so they’re very discreet places for a little keyword repetition.

Note that I don’t want to change keyword density so much that I de-optimize for my primary keyword phrase. The great thing is that secondary keyword phrases — popular searches you didn’t think of when you designed a lens — often overlap the words for the primary keyword phrase, so when you optimize for one, you optimize for the other.

Just remember, when you’re refining a page to target a secondary search phrase, don’t delete or dilute any spot on your lens where your primary keyword phrase appears.

Final Tip: Don’t forget to search Squidoo and the web to find other pages that use your keyword phrases. Anchor (clickable link) text is a juicy place to embed keyword phrases for SEO, and it helps your lens (and Squidoo) with clickthroughs.

It’s time to sort out Squidoo tags and how to use ‘em.

On the one hand, Squidoo tags have a powerful internal function within Squidoo: they cause lenses with the same tags to be featured in the Discovery Tool, and Squidoo’s search box uses Squidoo tags to help decide which Squidoo pages to list first. See Fluffanutta’s recent posts on How to Pick Primary Tags and Improved Tag Pages for some not-to-be-missed info.

Due to how Squidoo uses its tags to cross-link similar lenses, it’s best not to get too specific. There simply aren’t going to be many lenses tagged with long tailed tree wees (unless we get invaded by a horde of aging Elfquest fans writing trivia contests —did I just date myself?) No, my pointy-eared friends, you’ll be wanting to tag lenses with Elfquest and comics.

I view Squidoo tags as similar to the labels above grocery store aisles: they group together a whole collection of things you might also be interested in or be looking for.

On the other hand, Squidoo tags get fed into the meta keyword tag of a lens, and here’s where things get interesting. We’ve been told the meta keyword tag is dead…but is it?

Let’s back up. What the heck is a meta keyword tag?

The meta keyword tag, along with the meta title and meta description tag, is an invisible bit of code embedded at the beginning a webpage (you can see it by choosing “View Source” from your view menu). The meta keyword tag says, “Here’s some words and phrases that are related to my webpage. If anyone searches for those words and phrases, send ‘em here!”

About five seconds after people started using meta keyword tags, they realized they could steer gullible search engines into sending them more traffic. Sneaky people repeated keywords and used popular keywords, even if they had nothing to do with a page.  Search engines had to find other indicators, such as number of links to a page and on-page headers, to get a better handle on what each page was really about.

Nowadays, search engines still use the meta title tag (which on Squidoo is the title of your lens) and the meta description tag (which on Squidoo is the introduction module) to help identify page content. So it behooves you to lavish extra SEO attention on those areas. But what about the meta keywords tag, which Squidoo fills with your Squidoo tags?

Google doesn’t use the meta keyword tag at all. In the past, Yahoo, MSN and some other search engines have continued to let the keyword tag be one of the factors influencing how they rank webpages. One by one, search engines abandoned the meta keyword tag, until the last major holdout was Yahoo.

In October, a Yahoo rep announced that Yahoo no longer indexes the Meta Keywords tag. SEO bloggers celebrated keywords’  demise for the umpteenth time since they were first declared dead back in 2000 or so. A few SEO wonks did some tests once the champagne dried. To their horror, they discovered the meta keyword tag was still lurching around like a zombie. For example, if you search for “dsrurejjnr”, Yahoo’s first result is a test page with that gibberish embedded in its keywords tag and ONLY there, whereas other search engines turn up articles discussing the test.

Yahoo claims that it’s not being fooled: a representative insists that Yahoo weights title, description, and on-body text ahead of keywords, and only pays attention to keywords when no other “ranking signal” is present. Wrong. I just checked, and a webpage with “dsrurejjnr” in the title tag and URL ranks first on Google, but lower on Yahoo.

So what? Well, one, it reminds us of the backdoor approach to keywords: every search engine determines webpage rankings differently, so if you can’t get on page one of Google, you might on Yahoo.

Two, it suggests that we still have to juggle two conflicting uses for Squidoo tags: the “grocery store aisle label” approach I espoused above, and the “long tail” approach that is so effective for SEO. Lots of people use Yahoo search, yet we tend to  use Google-specific tools to research keywords.

My advice? Use your traffic stats tab on your dashboard to see what the top 1-3 long tail searches are that generate traffic on your lens over a period of time: 1-3 months. Add those. But reserve most of your Squidoo tags for Squidoo-optimizing (as opposed to major search engine optimizing) purposes. If you want to get really diligent about this, register at SEObook or one of the other websites that actually gives you Yahoo-specific data about keyword searches.

One thing, though, we gotta remember. Squidoo puts its tags on a lens not just in the meta keywords field, but as a list of links in the sidebar. Google and other search engines use “link text” to help determine search relevance. So keywords aren’t as dead on Squidoo lenses as the rest of the web! They can still help.

If you haven’t seen the video, you need to– it’ll make you smile. VERY effective. So far it’s gotten nearly 13 million hits, and that’s not counting all the duplicate copies floating around on YouTube plus a few million more on various European YouTube sites.

It’s a great case study in “linkbait,” content that’s so good people start linking to it. (Also known as “viral,” since linkbait this good can spread by word-of-mouth to millions of web users within days, even hours).

It also illustrates an SEO blunder.

I discovered that this video was, naturally, not a total accident, but a way to market something — an upcoming production of The Sound of Music in Antwerp.

As a promo, it succeeded brilliantly. Apparently it and the reality TV show used to choose the “new Maria” had everybody in Belgium in a frenzy to see the new show, which opened to sold out crowds just 5 months later.

One itsy bitsy problem. Google “Antwerp Sound of Music.” Say you want tickets or info about the production. You can’t find it! The viral video went global, took the blogging world by storm, and hogged the top keywords that probably should’ve gone to the musical production. I’m sure the website for the show wasn’t up yet — giving the promo months to attract thousands of SEO-boosting backlinks. So all the search results for those keywords are about the viral video.

Usually methods of self-promotion aren’t this wildly successful. However, users of lensroll.com may have noticed that posts there tend to get indexed a day or so before Squidoo itself, which may mean the lensroll.com entry about your lens gets a head start in search engine results for your keywords. I’ve had the same problem when I put a video on YouTube attached to a lens. Probably, YouTube gets crawled by search engines a few times a day.

In most cases, this is fine. Just make sure that wherever you talk about your site on the web, you leave a bright shiny link TO your site as close to the top of the webpage as possible. Be sure to use your lens’ keywords in the anchor text to help it in its quest for search engine domination. Also, be aware that if you ever stumble on the holy grail of SEO, content that goes viral, it’ll eat all the search engine results for its keywords as thousands of people blog about it.

Did you know that internal links– links on the same website pointing to other pages on that website– can boost a page in search engine results? I haven’t found a study showing exactly how much of a boost they provide, but I am persuaded by those who have done their homework, done controlled studies, and observed the outcome to be convinced that internal links — links from page A to page B on the same site –  can boost page B’s position in search engine results.

Skim these and see if you’re convinced:

• Internal Links Versus External Links (SEO-Theory’s findings, over-vague as usual but based on detailed studies)
  
• High Value Linking: Why Internal Links Work for SEO (Report by one SEO professional on success with internal links — doesn’t actually explain why they work, IMO; SEO-Theory’s article does)

On his SEO-Theory blog, Michael Martinez points out the obvious, yet I’ve never seen anyone else mention it: there is no research anywhere suggesting that search engines treat external links as more important than internal links in deciding a page’s “relevance”!

SEOmoz reports a study of internal links suggesting the anchor text of internal links may not be that important (at least to Google). Nevertheless, they wouldn’t be making the study if they didn’t think internal links were a factor in search engine rankings. If their tests had proved otherwise, they’d certainly have mentioned it!

That article also reports that excessive internal linkage may trip a Google penalty. I’m guessing this is why Squidoo masked Squidoo Tags pages from search engines in its robots.txt file, to avoid that penalty.

But I can’t see how you’d trip that penalty with a lensroll of relevant lenses, a Featured Lenses module, or spiffy-cool Table of Contents connecting up all your lenses in the same niche. Instead, internal connections between related lenses shoud boost their search rankings.

The bottom line:

MAKE SURE YOUR LENSES ON THE SAME NICHE LINK TO EACH OTHER!

Remember, when looking for ways to build links, that internal links count!

The Discovery Tool’s links back and forth between pages on Squidoo count!

Lensroll links to your lens count!

Links from group pages to your lens count!

Use them!

I got the same advice. I bought into it. But does social media/social networking really benefit SEO (search engine optimization)?

Hey, let me be social and ask you, the readers!

Now, let me give you my answer…

Answer: Tagfoot, as far as I can tell, is one of the few social media sites that benefits SEO.

It’s time for me to remind you of that social media links and SEO rant by Michael Martinez of SEO-Theory (you should really read the whole post to understand the context):

“Social media link building is a complete waste of time from a search engine optimization point of view. Even if you know of social media sites that haven’t yet implemented nofollow you don’t know how long that gravy will continue to taste good. Google is chasing your sorry social media linking profile and you need a better plan than that.”  —“Real Advice from Bad SEOs”

How do we know he’s right? How do we know which social networking links still pass the “backlink gravy”?

We need more than just a NoDoFollow Firefox plugin, although that’s a start.

That tells us that links on StumbleUpon, Del.ici.ous, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook are set NoFollow.

NoFollow means that search engines won’t follow or index those links. So for SEO purposes, those links are invisible! Links on those sites won’t boost your webpage’s position in search engine results one jot.

LinkedIn? It depends. The “Website” listed in your profile is Follow, the “Additional Information” section, including “My Websites”, is NoFollow. So, one link from a not-particularly-relevant website with no pagerank. Whoopie.

Reddit? Another “It depends.” Submitted URLs start out Nofollow and may be promoted to Follow if enough people up-vote them. But Reddit members react like antibodies when they sense self-promotion– they will BURY you.

Digg? Ah yes, the holy grail of linkspam. Nevermind that you can get your account suspended for self-promotion on Digg. Links on Digg are Follow, right? Linkbuild me, baby! I can always open a new account!

Except now Digg has implemented an ingenious way of redirecting all the SEO benefit to itself for links submitted to Digg. See The Truth about Digg’s Diggbar, The Digg Toolbar Exposed or 5 Reasons Diggbar Sucks for more information. (In light of their findings, I’ve added a Frame Free WordPress plug-in to block Diggbar from this blog. Nice PR disaster, Digg.)

Tagfoot is the only social networking I’ve found whose bookmarks are set Follow, whose robots.txt file doesn’t block spiders, and which doesn’t ban users for self-promotion. But before you all run out to spam Tagfoot, remember that Tagfoot members will block you or flag you as a spammer if you abuse the system. [[UPDATE June 9, 2009: Tagfoot has set its links to NoFollow for ordinary users, DoFollow for special members. See this post for more info.]]

So, am I saying you should give up on using social networking to promote your (quality!) webpages?

No. My point is that social media sites are lousy for search engine optimization– getting search engines to send you traffic. So don’t bother with SEO tactics on social media sites. When participating in social networking, optimize for humans!

Post a viral video on YouTube or a good photograph on Flickr with a link back to your website, and members of those sites may click on the link, even if search engine spiders ignore it.

Likewise, if you participate in a social media community, recommend good websites, and earn a following, your followers will follow your links even if search engines don’t.

That means investing time in meaningful participation on social networking sites. Interact with people. React to people. Carry on conversations. Read and rate what others are linking to. Retweet. Etc. You can’t cheat with social networking — you have to be social.

You may find that you’d prefer to sink more effort into passive forms of traffic generation — e.g. keyword optimization — which continue to work when you’re busy doing other stuff. With blogs, forums, and social networking, as soon as you stop participating, most of the traffic dies away.

Which brings me back to the point I keep making about building web traffic with social media: join social networking communities if you enjoy being active in online communities! Getting visitor traffic from followers is a secondary return on your (time) investment. Your primary ROI for social networking sites is the enjoyment and satisfaction of social networking.

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.

To review, here’s what I mean by “sexy” search engine results, a term I coined for my Squidoo SEO lens. Your results should tell what your page is about and what your visitors will get out of going there:

Sexy Search Engine Results

That time, I got it right. Here’s my UN sexy search results that I’m trying to fix:

Un-Sexy Search Engine Results

What I did wrong: I forgot that search engine results tend to quote the first instance of your keyword on your page that’s not in the page title or H tags.

To correct this, I added a “Squidbits are…” blurb in my sidebar summarizing what the blog is about, before the sentence Google had latched onto. However, my correction turned up as the second, not first result, and it still needs fine-tuning:

Slightly Better Search Engine Results

Things to note from this example:

1. Google lists only two search results per domain unless someone clicks the “similar pages” link. If you’re publishing on a user-submitted-content site like Squidoo, you must make sure there aren’t several other articles optimized for your keywords. If you don’t check, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle to dislodge them from the top two spots.
2. The first search result here is the front page of my blog, but it’s a front page from a few weeks ago. Once a search engine crawls a page, it may not come back for a while. Again, make sure the first sentence in which your keyword is embedded illustrates what your page is about and helps “sell” it.
3. Notice what Google has highlighted as my keyword: it’s got the keyword I expected it to highlight, and a two-word version with a space in it. I’m not sure if that would trump the single-word version, but remember that search engines often index variations of the search term. This reminds us to use plurals instead of singulars, because the singular form of the search term is found in a plural, but not vice versa.
4. For the first result, why did Google choose the excerpt it chose, instead of my “Squidbits are…” blurb which also appears on that page? Oh, right: on most templates, the sidebar-content “follows” the main column’s content, even if they’re side-by-side.  Less obvious is the fact that two instances of the keyword within a sentence or two in the body text seemed to rank better than two instances earlier on the page, in which one was an alt-tag (see #6 bel0w).
5. The second search result is a blog post uploaded less than an hour before I originally performed this search. I don’t know whether Google’s fast indexing of that post is due to WordPress’Google sitemap plugin, the plugin that auto-tweets each new post, or a routinely-scheduled visit by a Google spider. But the fact that Google picked the most recent post with that blurb on  it — a blurb which appears in the sidebar of every page of my blog –  is one modest example of how freshness can trump a page which has more links (I’ve got some blog posts which Squidlog.com and other sites have linked to). Unfortunately, I don’t have enough experience to know when Google’s freshness boost trumps the SEO boost from backlinks, or by how much. But I think it’s safe to say that all else being equal (or close to it), Google may privilege the most recent blog entry as second in your search results after your blog’s homepage. And golly gee, that makes sense!
6. The second search result excerpt includes two instances of my keyword: first the blog’s header image, and then the “Squidbits are…” blurb. Problem: I had forgotten about the alt-tag in my header image. It is NOT sexy, referring to a “rotating header image” that I had disabled in my blog template since it slowed down page loading time. Remember the alt-tags of images are searched by some search engines, and may be counted as the first instance of your keyword on your page.

You may have noticed that I’ve barely mentioned my blog’s name in this post, instead referring to it as “my blog title”. After seeing what happened with the above results, I’m being extra-cautious about how often I use my keyword within a short span of text. However, avoiding using a keyword isn’t a very good form of keyword management!

Instead, I should be working my keyword, “Squidbits,” into every page of my Squidbits blog in a way that demonstrates effective SEO. I should be able to control which excerpt Google features for “Squidbits” through repetition and emphasis. I make the excerpt “sexy” by telling searchers what Squidbits is about, so they’ll want to check out my Squidbits blog on Squidoo tips and basic SEO. On the other hand, blatant, clumsy repetition of “Squidbits” may drive visitors away, since I’m clearly trying to manipulate my search results for Squidbits, at the expense of readability.

Figuring out how to weave keywords into your webpage to optimize for search engines while communicating effectively with your readers is an art! You want your page to be fun and readable for visitors. Your human audience must be your first priority; search engines come second. But with practice, one should learn to appeal to both, unobtrusively.

Obviously, I’m still learning how. Stay tuned for the next chapter of my quest for “sexy” search engine results!

EDIT: Two hours after posting this blog entry, it’s been indexed:

Sexier Search Results

Squidbits – Greekgeek’s Squidoo Blog › Edit Post — WordPress

Notes:

I see my alt-tag adjustment has now registered: I changed the alt-tag to say: “Squidbits: Squidoo and SEO Tips”.

In fact, I’ve now succeeded in getting the “Squidbits are…” blurb to show up at the top of my search results, as I had intended. Why? Because the old entry mentioning “Squidbits” has been pushed to a back page, instead of being on the front page. Therefore, Google’s seeing instances my keyword on my front page in the following order: 1) Page title 2) the image header’s alt-tag “Squidbits: Squidoo and SEO Tips”, and 3) the blurb in the sidebar. If I write another blog post mentioning Squidbits before the “More” break, I predict that it will edge out the sidebar blurb again. See how careful you have to be to track where your keyword shows up?

And again, the second search result turning up is from the most recent post — at the moment, this one. I notice that my experiment with keyword repetition and emphasis a few paragraphs back didn’t trick Google. It is giving the first instance of my keyword in the body of this post, even though it’s not the most well-optimized instance on the page (which, I think, would’ve been the version that’s boldface and a link).  So, again, the first instance of your keyword on a page is likely the one that Google will quote.
Checking out Yahoo search results, it looks like it’s a lot slower on the uptake than Google. So far, it’s only listing my blog post on Samhain the Cat’s guide to search optimization, and that’s 2 pages back in the SERPs. Meanwhile, Live search from MSN only has my Twitter channel talking about Squidbits. Showing just how different the different search engines are… AND it is not wise to discount them.

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.

Even the expert lensmasters are struggling to maintain their highest-ranked lenses in the top tier.
Two of mine have just barely dropped below 2000– they were bumped by two of my other lenses which have moved up! They may cancel out each other’s top tier lensrank at the end of the month unless I can fix this.
I can’t seem to get the ones that dropped to come back; they’re both sitting in the 2000-2200 range.

Steps I’m taking:

Updated it with new, useful information that I know people have asked for, and SquidCasted this fact. [Alert! I have added rounded corners code to my CSS quick reference guide, color codes for a few more colors I've noticed Squidoo using, and links to free tools that let you test how your lens looks on different browsers! Alll this and more on CSS-Codes: Making Your Webpages Look Great! ]