Adventures in Squidoo, SEO, CSS and Web Design
Ooo! Everyone's always wondering where to get backlinks. One thing people often forget about is that inter-linking counts. That is, links from the same domain as your page count as a backlink! That's why Squidoo cross-links lenses in so many ways.
There is a powerful backlink source hidden right in plain sight: your Squidoo lensmaster bio.
People find things on the web by searching. SEO helps you get your page in front of people searching for it. SEO is like throwing fishing hooks into a sea full of hungry fish. The more SEO you know, the better you'll be able to ensure your hook gets seen by lots of fish.
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.
SquidQuiz is a fun, quick kind of Squidoo lens. Create a trivia quiz on a topic you love, add a Featured Lenses module to your other quizzes, and you only need one more content module to get the lens featured. For those of us who tend to make long, involved lenses on topics, this is a great way to force us to be brief.
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.
Here is an unsolicited recommendation: Read the SquidUtils Blog!
The Fluffanutta is a tech-savvy Squidoo member who has created add-ons for the Squidoo Workshop, maintains the SquidUtils site chock-full of free goodies for Squidoo lensmasters, and is responsible for some of the tools that eventually became incorporated into Squidoo itself. I use his Workshop Add-ons tools as part of my lensbuilding/promoting routine. He knows more about how Squidoo works than just about anybody who isn't an actual employee of Squidoo.
The SquidUtils Blog has tons of tips and suggestions for how to get the most out of Squidoo. I've learned an awful lot of what I know from that blog and Fluff's post in the SquidU forums, and when I ask a question, Fluffanutta is usually the one who tells me what I need to know.
So. SquidUtils Blog. Great source of Squidoo secrets and practical knowledge.
This post is a thank-you to Fluff for straightening me out and helping me understand two different Squidoo topics in the last couple of days!
I often use Flickr and YouTube for hosting my lens images and video and as a way to drive traffic. I prefer hosting my best-looking photos on Flickr as opposed to Photobucket or even my own website, because I can add something in the description field like "This is an illustration for Ancient Greece Odyssey: My Tour of Delphi" which gets keywords into the link. Having tagged my photos carefully for things like Greece and Delphi and Greek Art, I get a lot of traffic from people searching for those iamges on Flickr.
These are the kind of visitors you want most: a targeted audience who will be more likely to click your links, or even your sales modules, because they’re interested in what your lens is about.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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 modules are built-in affiliate marketing, supplementing Squidoo ad payouts with sales commissions.
For example, Amazon modules send us “royalties” if a visitor makes a purchase through them. We get a commission for any purchase the visitor makes after clicking on that link! (Tip: if you regularly make 7 or more Amazon sales a month, it’s time to get your own Amazon Associates ID. Captain Loyalis explains why.)
Other Squidoo modules, like Zazzle, don’t earn a commission, but members of those online e-commerce sites can can use the appropriate module to show off their products and stores.
What’s in it for the rest of us? Should we, as one member in SquidU said he was doing, rip out non-commercial-earning modules?
There’s four or five reasons why the answer is “Not necessarily!”
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