I’d like to talk about how I put together the Squidoo Museum. It demonstrates everything I know about graphics, color, fonts, and CSS.

First, I built the content. I knew what I wanted on my lens– a showcase of lenses of the type I want to see more of on Squidoo– so all I had to do is collect and organize it in a semi-logical fashion. I published it once I had the basic facts, ideas, things I wanted to say written out, and a lens logo. That was it.

Then I worked on the writing style. I could see that a plain old lensography didn’t have much draw. Like a Latin or Etymology class, you have to work harder to make dry content come to life. Give it a personality. Show why you love it, and let that passion be contagious.

I love antiquities, and my topics — science, history, geography — reminded me of the Smithsonian. I’d already named the lens the Squidoo Museum. So I had my model: a museum, a World’s Fair, an antiquarian’s collection of curiosities. You could use any sort of conceit — a racetrack, a shopping mall (which has been done to marvelous effect by Margaret Shaut), a library, a playground — to give a lens a cohesive theme.

I invented a fake curator, and pulled a tongue-in-cheek antiquarian style to give the lens personality.

Once I realized that my theme was a sort of Victorian version of the Smithsonian, then I started working on graphics. I mostly searched Wikimedia Commons for images, because they’re almost all public domain, and some Creative Commons. That took a while. I then had to pick one size for all of them, so they’d look cohesive, and shrink/crop all the graphics to the same size.

Last of all, I did a better lens logo. I found myself putting a border on it, mostly because I’d been forced to do a tight crop.

The lens logo dictated the CSS styles of my lens. I saw it was a spare, grayish-blue sort of graphic, so I replicated that throughout the lens. In fact, I replicated the colors precisely.

Since the graphic had a border, the introduction module paragraph next to it needed a border. Try to get the Introduction Module to coordinate graphics and text, since that’s the first thing visitors see. I used the eyedropper in my graphics program to find out the actual color of the border of the graphic, and used that for the color of the paragraph border. I borrowed a few grays and blues from the graphic to color other parts of the lens.

Then I worked a heck of a lot with CSS to get the graphics and text to fit their areas nicely, and for colors to harmonize.

Colors Tip: Look closely at the Introduction Module of the Squidoo Museum (thumbnail above). I painted a colored border on the graphic in Photoshop:
– Use the eyedropper to pick a dark color in the graphic.
– Select All.
– Make a new layer.
– Under the edit menu, pick STROKE to stroke a border around the graphic.
Then I double-clicked the color of that border, COPIED the color code, and used it for the CSS border of the paragraph in the lens. In other words, use the eyedropper in your graphics program to discover color codes of the lens logo, and use those colors for text, borders or paragraphs in the Introduction Module. (In this lens, I picked up the blue of the fireworks for the paragraph border.)

For all my best CSS tricks, see my Advanced CSS Tricks lens. Or learn basic CSS on my CSS Tutorial and Quick Reference lens.

And yes, I need to update the museum again! Or at least the newsletter.

Spam That Has ABSOLUTELY Nothing To Do With This Post

Apologies. I’m testing something SEO-related. I’ll let you know what I’ve learned (if anything) after the experiment is over.

Kithyra Grunderbar Kithyra Grunderbar

Now I’ve reorganized it and made it more dignified (slightly), and added all the tricks I tend to use most on my lenses: rounded corners, background-images for paragraphs, captions under aligned images, drop caps, dramatic numbered lists, and most of all, playing around with the introduction module to make the first thing visitors see look great.

I’ve moved the old lab experiments to page 2. There’s another use for a Page Break!

(My “crazy lab experiments” lens is now ZEE CODE SCRATCHPAD. Once I’ve got things working nicely there, I may move the “finished products” to the AdvancedCSS lens for prime time viewing.)

Also, Google rewards frequently updated content.

These are two separate things, but they go together.

What are your techniques for keeping lenses fresh?

Here’s some of mine.

Quick Fix — do one of the following

• While watching TV, I’ll sort my dashboard by date (click the date column at top), then edit and re-publish. Don’t do all of them on the same day — stagger them so you’re doing 10 or so on different days.
• Check traffic stats. Change the range to 3 months. See any long tail phrases that are getting a lot of hits? Go edit your lens, see if you can have that phrase appear in a module title or image filename or body text without it being intrusive to human readers.
• Edit for clarity. Trim excess verbiage, tighten prose.
• Check your images. Do you have alt-text (or labels) that match your keywords? Do imagenames match your keywords?
• Search Squidoo. See if you can find any good lenses on your topic to feature or lensroll.
• Search Amazon. See if you can find any good products to feature in a sidebar widget.

Slightly Longer Fix

• Jot down the purpose of your lens on a post-it or something (Goals #1, 2, 3). Read your lens module by module. Does each part satisfy a goal? Or is there stuff in your lens that doesn’t satisfy the lens goal? Why is it there?
• Look for any graphics that could be improved. Search for Creative Commons, clip art or stock photos to make it look better.
• Skim the answer deck. See any ideas that catch your eye? Read a “tips and techniques” lens, and apply it to yours.
• Search the web for your topic. See any useful information or sites you could link to? Maybe get some new ideas.
• Search YouTube for related videos.
• Search Vimeo, Veoh, and OTHER video sites for related videos. We always forget those!
• Search Twitter for tweets related to your lens topic. The Tweets themselves won’t give you anything new, but they might point you at (a) news, products, or content you could add to your lens or (b) what people interested in your topic are talking about.

All right, your turn! What do you do to keep lenses updated?

So I should share more of my tips on graphics and webpage design. Here’s a few!

First, I just posted a lens on Squidoo’s themes and text colors, giving all the HTML color codes for each Squidoo theme (themes, not co-brands — I need to do co-brands too, don’t I?)

Second, I like jeffreyv’s tip to drag this Find Stock Photos link into your toolbar (or bookmark it) to use Yahoo to search for stock photos. In fact, I like it so much that I may have to hack the code to add my own favorite ways to search for images. For a first try, here’s a Google Creative Commons search, which doesn’t just search Flickr (unlike the default Creative Commons website), but searches for ALL images with Creative Commons licenses. More on this later.

Third, if you haven’t gone there already, go to my Free Web Graphics: Where to Find them (Legally)! lens. It really is possible to find good graphics without breaking copyright, but it helps to know where to look!

And fourth: did you know you can change the color of black boxes, and even add a background-image? It looks gorgeous. It also makes a great frame for Allposters.com ads, but you’ll need to trim it severely.

Here’s how. First, get a Static Link to a single poster. Change it to “Large Image”, and choose “No” on every single radio button that you can.

Buy at AllPosters.com

Second, take the code that they give you, and trim what’s not essential so that you can fit within the Black Box’s 500 character limit. Red parts can be deleted:

<a href=“http://affiliates.allposters.com/link/redirect.asp?item=390463&AID=1192828929&PSTID=1&LTID=2&lang=1“ target=”_blank” title=”Tourn&#233;e du Chat Noir, c.1896″><img src=“http://imagecache6.allposters.com//LRG//\20\2032\9IE4D00Z.jpg” alt=”Tourn&#233;e du Chat Noir, c.1896″ border=”0″ height=“450“ width=“332“></a>
<img src=“http://tracking.allposters.com/allposters.gif?AID=1192828929&PSTID=1&LTID=2&lang=1“ border=”0″ height=“1” width=“1“>
<BR>
<span style=”font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica;font-size:10;” >

<a href=“http://affiliates.allposters.com/link/redirect.asp?item=390463&AID=1192828929&PSTID=1&LTID=2&lang=1“ target=”_blank” title=”Tourn&#233;e du Chat Noir, c.1896″>Buy  at AllPosters.com</a><BR>
</span>

You don’t have to delete all of that, but watch your character count and delete until you’ve gotten under the 500 character limit. The black box will then make a dramatic and sharp-looking frame for your poster, something like this (only with rounded corners, which WordPress isn’t letting me do, #@$!):

Here, Kitty, Kitty

Buy at AllPosters.com

• 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.

I tried the W3 Link Checker as Fluff suggested, but its interface is a little intimidating and hard to understand for Jane Average Web User.

After poking around, I would like to recommend the following free tool: iwebtool’s Broken Link Checker.

It limits you to 5 checks an hour unless you’re a paid subscriber. That seems fair enough! The interface is simple: a check means a link is working, a red x means it’s broken.

As usual, Seth is simple and short, whereas my own 3-part Squidoo tips tutorial on how to build web traffic is in-depth and too long.

One of Seth’s points jumped out at me:

You have no right to traffic. If you’re lucky, and GOOD, you earn some.

You’ll earn it when you do something daring, interesting, useful, provocative, free, compelling, emotional or urgent.

Hurry.

I’ve said this in other ways, but never quite so bluntly: YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO [WEB] TRAFFIC.

There are millions of fascinating, useful, incredible, wonderful, exactly-what-people-want web pages out there. A web user will never see more than a tiny fraction of them. So why should anyone pick your page, out of all those pages, to visit? Why stay there? Why read it?

It’s up to you to make it worth their time.

I just noticed on my “Is Squidoo a Scam?” lens that someone said he’d made four lenses and hadn’t earned any money in six months, and he was giving up.

On the one hand, it IS hard to get web traffic.

On the other hand, he hadn’t filled in his profile, he only had ONE lens left in his profile, and it was on a very popular topic for which there are over 970,000 webpages, according to Google.

Newbies write on popular topics, thinking they’ll get lots of traffic. They don’t realize that popular topics have thousands if not millions of pages already written on them, and they’re competiting with all those pages.

Okay, I’m preaching to the choir. The point is, you can’t assume a page will get traffic. It really is work to make useful, unique, readable, entertaining, grab-the-visitor-by-the-throat-and-make-them-stay webpages.

What can you do to boost the odds?

• Write on what you LOVE and KNOW. Passion, humor, and real in-depth knowledge shines through.
• Write on things that aren’t the most popular topic. Think of things you’ve looked up online or wondered about. Think about things you know which are off the beaten track. Lionel trains? Your town’s traditions or landmarks? A particular product, book, author, body part or animal? Seek topics that haven’t been done to death.
• Research, research, research. Not only do you want to cover the most important things about your topic, but you should find and link to the best websites and videos on your topic.
• Organization. Make it clear what your page is about, where you’re going to take your reader, and what they’ll get out of your lens right in the introduction.
• See my top ten Squidoo tips for some other ideas about how to make your lens stand out.
• Once in a while, make a list of ten webpages you’ve visited. Then write down the following. What brought you there? Did you read the webpage all the way through? What on the page held your attention?  If you clicked on any links, why did you click them? If you did NOT read the whole page, why? What did you skip? What did NOT hold your attention? Your tastes aren’t everybody’s, but the more you understand what keeps people on a page — and what doesn’t — the more you’ll be able to write successful webpages.

The bottom line: your lens has to be useful, entertaining and/or informative, NOT generic. You have to “earn” your traffic, as Seth puts it.

And then use as much SEO as you can to get your content found.

How to Make a Pyramid Kite gets kids trying to build pyramids for a school project.

Ancient Greece Odyssey, my travel diary, gets kids needing maps of Greece or information about Greek history and art.

My California Sea Hare page gets medical students trying to track down neurological research using sea slugs!

How do I know? I watch the Traffic Stats tab on my lenses and monitor for phrases like “Roman names for Greek gods” or “How to make a pyramid school project”.

This suggests a powerful untapped strategy for web traffic.

First, monitor your lens traffic stats. If you’ve got queries asking student-type questions, TARGET them. I do this in a few ways.

1) I create  a new lens answering the question and targeting the search phrase. I’ve done a few spin-off lenses like my Greece Odyssey FAQ answering “Ten questions students have about ancient Greece.”

2) I create a quiz targeting the questions/area that students are asking about.

3) Adjust/tweak the content of a lens to target unexpected search queries. Traffic stats showed my kitemaking lens drew a lot of students trying to build an Egyptian pyramid for school. So I put a note in the introduction saying, “Kids! Need to build a pyramid for school? Here’s how to adapt these instructions to make a pyramid! And here’s a stone wall pattern you can print out to wrap the pyramid!” with a link. The link is important– clickthroughs boost lensrank!

4) If you’re a parent, you have a secret weapon that I don’t — your kids’ homework! Don’t just help them with their homework. Make a lens about it. Even better, get THEM to make a lens, or help you make it! Today’s homework could be tomorrow’s second tier lens earning $2 a month!

Students don’t have big pocketbooks, so they’re not going to help you make gobs of money in affiliate marketing. But they ARE search engine savvy. They’re lazy. They want answers, and they want ‘em now!

Make sure the intro to your lens shows that you’ve got the exact answers they’re looking for, as I did with the “make a pyramid” query I kept seeing. Otherwise they’re liable to hit the back button and look elsewhere.

Don’t do their homework for them.  I give hints, help, and links to good websites on Greece, etc where they can find more info. I try NOT to write a big block that a student could lift wholesale and plug into an essay.

I also teach about plagiarism. I tell visitors that since I’ve done some work for them, the honest way to say “thank you” and not steal my work is to give credit. I tell them how to cite my webpage in a bibliography for a student paper. It’s good to teach students about copyright when they’re young! I’ve had a few students thanking me and promising to give me credit.

As I said, most students aren’t going to purchase much on your lenses except, perhaps, books that may help them in class or may help them write a paper. So targeting student traffic won’t earn you gobs of money. But if you can target student queries using good SEO, you’ll be aiming for an audience that big online businesses tend to ignore. It doesn’t take that much traffic to get a lens into the second tier, as long as you’re encouraging clickthroughs. So use students to build $2-a-month lenses, second tier lenses, and you could start raking an untapped resource of web traffic!

There is a powerful backlink source hidden right in plain sight: your Squidoo lensmaster bio.

Your “About Me” bio includes links to your top ten lenses in terms of lensrank, plus any links you may have hand-typed within your Bio. For instance, if you click the “More” link in my Default Lensmaster Bio  that shows up in the upper righthand of EVERY ONE of my Squidoo lenses, you get a popup that says:

Part-time Latin tutor, art history instructor, artist and writer puttering away at a PhD in mythology and depth psychology.

My lenses currently include art, gifts and musings related to ancient Greece – Ancient Greece Odyssey and my Toyota Prius, just because I keep having to answer the question –  “Yes, I Love My Hybrid Car!”

Greekgeek’s Pages

• Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal
• Free Web Graphics: Where to Get Them (Legally!)
• SquidU’s Lensmaster Lounge: Help for New Squids
• Squidoo SEO: Help Search Engines Send Traffic to You
• Squidoo Tips: Building Web Traffic
• Convert Your Prius to a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV)
• Make a Fancy Table of Contents
• Basic Kite Making: How to Build a Pyramid Kite
• The Care and Feeding of Apostrophes
• Sparta, The Mean Kitty of YouTube

See all of Greekgeek’s pages

ALL of those links are embedded in EVERY single one of my lenses. So those count as backlinks. LOTS of backlinks. With 110 lenses, that means that those lenses all get 110 backlinks!  So be sure to include links to some lenses you want to promote in your default bio. Then rejoice that all your lenses are giving a small SEO boost to your ten highest-ranked lenses…automatically!

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.