• iTunes – earn commission, feature iTunes tracks
• My Lenses – show your lenses filed under a certain category or topic.
• RSS Mashup – show recent posts from several RSS or blog feeds.

Click links above to see them demonstrated on my “Secret Squidoo Modules” lens!

NOTE: All of these have NoFollow links, so “My Lenses” isn’t the best way to get link juice from a lensography. But the content is crawled/indexed/seen by search engines.

Also, did you know? The Netflix module is commission-earning too!

I’ve been adding and updating my complete list of all Squidoo modules, so you might want to stop by and browse the list or download a new, updated version.

Here’s the steps I took to make this effective lens.

1) Find a controversial subject LOTS of people are talking about, and/or notice something in current news/buzz that people may look up.

I follow space news, and heard there were some new cool photos of moon landing sites. When I searched for them on the web, I ran into a whole pile of people claiming the moon landings are a hoax! (This would be news to my Mom’s friend Neil Armstrong.) A number of people were asking why there were no photos of moon landers from space. Aha! A question that can be answered with a Squidoo lens! Juicy debate and controversy! Perfect for getting traffic. Now, how to target it…

2) Find popular keyword searches for that topic.

First I looked at news posts, blog posts and especially the comments to see what words and phrases people were using to discuss the topic. I paid special attention to questions people were asking in comments, because when people ask questions, they often search the web for answers! I wrote these words, phrases and questions down, then checked their popularity in Google Adwords and Wordtracker to see what people were searching most often.  Finally, I Googled for “allinurl: <keywords>” and “allintitle: <keywords>” to figure out which of these phrases didn’t have too much competition (other webpages optimized to target those keywods).

Remember the golden rule of SEO: find popular search phrases for which there isn’t too much competition!

3) Weave keywords into page title, URL, lens photo’s filename, links, and a few module headers — this is standard Squidoo SEO practice.

My title is actually long– ideally it should be 4-5 words long  — but it’s covering several different popular search phrases.

4) Write entertaining copy that answers the exact questions people were asking.

For example, I noticed some folks asking about photos of the American flag on the moon, so I found a photo that showed it it. I noticed that some critics were complaining about the bright white spots on some of the moon lander photos, caused by major sun glare, so I found a video that illustrates exactly that.

5) Provide LOTS of clickthrough links.

Clickouts are key. Getting visitors to a webpage is step 1. Step 2 is to get them to DO something once they arrive — click links, buy products, view videos, vote in polls, etc. I included links right in the introduction that Mr. Five Second Attention Span might click on, then useful links — again related to the questions people asked on the topic — throughout.  Clickthroughs boost lensrank, and are a vital part of second tier lenses!

6) Get good, free, LEGAL graphics and videos to illustrate the webpage.

NASA images are very handy: since NASA is a US government agency, most of its images are available to the general public for reuse! Check permissions on NASA pages to make sure. This means that space-related topics are a gold mine for Squidoo lenses, since there’s lots of free photos available. See my Free Web Graphics lens for other sources of free images. For ideas about new lenses, you might take the unusual step of collecting interesting images, then writing a lens on that topic!

7. Interactivity (polls, guestbook, etc).

Interactivity increases reader interest in a lens, and the clicks may boost lensrank.

I also feel like bragging, although I am actually a little surprised at one of the purple stars I just found in my inbox. It’s not my best lens. I suppose it’s unique content, though!

So here are all my Purple Stars and other Squidoo awards, plus a few personal benchmarks for which I am proud.

The Purple Stars

• Make a Fancy Table of Contents (5.29.09) I put a buttload of work into making this tutorial beautiful as well as useful.
• The Great Blizzard of 1978 (11.16.09) Just a fun lens about a piece of history I lived through.
• Convert Your Prius to a Plug-in Hybrid (11.21.09) Who found this?! It’s one of my oldest lenses, a somewhat dated report on the very first commercially-available kit to turn a regular into a plug-in hybrid.
• Greekgeek Squidoo Tips: How to Get Your Lens Found ( I think and hope this lens and its 2 sequels have helped a lot of new Squidoo lensmasters.
• How to Make a Pyramid Kite (12.9.09) Woot! I first built this webpage in ’94 as a cool “here’s something I know — use it!” gift to the web. I’ve always been proud of this lens, despite its simplicity.

The Lens of the Day(s)

The first one was nominated barely two weeks after I started on Squidoo, and is still the cornerstone of my Squidoo presence. The second one is a rare case in which I self-nominated, but I had a good reason: (a) Jackie Robinson Day was coming up and (b) the lens donates its earnings to his charity, so I was eager to get it in the spotlight.

• Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal (Lens created 5.5.07,  Made LOTD on 5.17.07)
• Jackie Robinson: An American Hero (Made LOTD in early April ’09)

Ancient Greece Odyssey also made 5th place runner-up for Lens of the Year 2007, and won Best Travel Lens in 2008. It has also been reviewed by several lensmaster blogs!

Giant Squid Community Showcase

• Funny Signs and Bizarre Billboards As so often, I had no idea this lens had been nominated until I noticed the traffic stats sending me fresh traffic. This would’ve been September ’08.

Top 100 Lenses

• Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal 220 days in the Top 100, currently at 91.  Best rank: #3.
• Greekgeek’s Squidoo Tips: How to Get Your Lens Found 200 days in the Top 100, currently at 61. Best rank: #8.
• SquidU Lensmaster Lounge Help 72 days in Top 100, currently 1111. Best rank #29.
• Make a Fancy Table of Contents 50 days in Top 100, currently 3094. Best rank #3.
• Volcanoes Are Hot Stuff, 31 days on top 100, currently 7503. Best Rank: #31.
• Jackie Robinson: An American Hero 36 days on Top 100, currently 8500. Best Rank: #6.

As you can see, about half my “Best” lenses are Squidoo-related, but I’m happy to see that half of them are simply on topics I’m passionate about. Although really I’m such a CSS Addict that “Fancy Table of Contents” counts, too.

Random Traffic and Ratings

• Ancient Greece Odyssey lifetime visits: 19160 (adding all the other chapters, it’s about  40,000). 200 ratings.
• Greekgeek’s Squidoo Tips: 20193 lifetime visits, 826 ratings.
• Funny Signs: 26307 visits, 28 ratings. LOTS of search engine traffic, even though I knew nothing about SEO when I made it!
• How to Make a Pyramid Kite: 19797 lifetime visits, 15 ratings. Another pre-SEO lens that just happene to grab keywords.
  
• Fancy Table of Contents: only 4600 visits, but it was made 7 months ago and has 258 ratings!

Okay, that’s enough stats. I’m not so interested in pay, but if you want to know more about ALL my lenses and stats, see Greekgeek’s Squidoo Stats for pay days and breakdowns of my lenses from best to worst.

But WAIT! Back up. See what I said back there? Add a Featured Lenses module to your other quizzes. Or any sort of links to your lenses on related topics!

I think this could be very powerful for SEO. I didn’t figure out the system until lens #3, but I soon realized there’s an SEO trick staring us in the face.

1. Identify a keyword on one of your popular lenses
2. Make a Squidoo Quiz TARGETING that keyword, with the keyword in the lens title, lens image filename, and module titles
3. LINK back to your popular lens with the keyword in the anchor text
4. Rinse, repeat!

This is something like the blog effect. Google tends to like backlinks from fresh content, so links from blog posts are great for SEO. SquidQuizzes are so quick and easy to build you can do one or two an hour. No, it’s not as fast as submitting to random directories, but how much weight does Google really place on StumbleUpon entries (which are nofollow) or Digg entries (which are cloaked behind a Diggbar)? The keywords on the SquidQuiz lens demonstrate that it’s relevant to your keywords, and the link then passes that keyword-SEO juice back to the mother lens.

So what do you think? I’m going to give it a try.

Tonight I have made:

• Greek Mythology Trivia Quiz
• Greek Mythology Quiz: Athena
• Greek Mythology Quiz: Apollo

I’m going to make a few more, then create a navigator bar in the introduction of each module linking them all together. I’ll add a Featured Lenses module at the bottom of each lens reminding visitors of the other lenses.

Linkbuilding is a necessary part of SEO, but people waste so much time building links on sites that are nofollow or not particularly relevant to their content, thus passing little or no backlink value. How about linkbuilding by building Squidoo lenses, each of which promotes all the other lenses it links to AND earns you a royalty? Lazy Lensmaster SEO says: YES!

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.

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.

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.