Adventures in Squidoo, SEO, CSS and Web Design
Doot de dooo. Time to check the dashboard and see how the lenses are doing. Hm hm hm, good good, hey, that's one's back in the second tier, and...
WHAT? 300 visits + recent sales = THIRD TIER? Oh, Squidoo, I am WOUNDED TO THE QUICK!
You're picking on me! No, wait, you've changed the lens algorithm to cheat me out of my rightful lensrank! It's a conspiracy! It's a bug! It's inconceivable!
And it's been happening with that particular lens a lot lately.
In fact, this is a VERY good thing.
Addendum -- just because I'm curious -- how many Squidoo pages have the different search engines got indexed?
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!
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.
Squidoo tags are funny beasts. They work in two entirely different ways: on Squidoo, as a way to cross-link lenses together, and in search engines, they help target search traffic. Just to be more complicated, we've got some conflicting info on how, exactly, search engines handle meta keywords, which for our purposes are Squidoo tags.
It's time to sort out Squidoo tags and how to use 'em.
Have you taken a look at Pastiche's Squidoo Stats Blog?
She doesn't give earnings, just her lens tier breakdown. 40 lenses in the top 2000 out of 120. FORTY. That's
one out of every three of her lenses earning top dollar. AND they'll be earning lots of Amazon commisisons, on top of ad revenue!
I have been aware of and lensrolled or featured some of Pastiche's lenses on clipart, but that figure still knocked my socks off.
It's worth taking the time to stop and admire Pastiche, and observe her secrets to Squidoo success:
1) Cover a niche very well, with lots of lenses devoted to seasonal and specific topics within that niche.
2) Make well-organized, attractive, easy-to-use and easy-to-read lenses.
3) Target keywords like crazy so you get a lot of traffic for specific searches. Don't just have a lens on clipart. Have a lens on clipart for vintage hearts, or John Deere Tractor clipart, or squirrels.
4) Clickthroughs. Oh my gosh the clickthroughs. Nearly everyone coming to her lens is LOOKING for something, and almost certainly will be clicking on some of her links because she gives EXACTLY what she promise to give with the lens title and opening blurb.
5) Amazon modules that target her reader's wishes and needs exactly. It's one thing to promote items related to your lens topic. It's another thing altogether to target a particular audience that is desperately wanting the thing you offer, and will be quite likely to buy it.
She's identified a corner of the web for which there is a steady and unrelenting command, and provides a service so that lots and lots of people looking for it will come to her. I know from my own lens on where to get free graphics that there's a bottomless demand here, but I haven't really done much to monetize or follow up on that. Pastiche has!
Of course, since she's cornered the market on clipart so well, the answer is not to try and target the same niche, but to apply Pastiche's winning Squidoo strategy to another niche-- one that's wide open.
Hats off to you, Pastiche!
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!
My theory about Lensrank is that most Dashboard stats are used to calculate Lensrank, although we have no idea how they're weighted. Otherwise, why is Squidoo taking up huge gobs of server time and space to crunch those numbers for hundreds of thousands of lenses each day?
I have been away for a while, and just noticed a third stat added to the Traffic stats for a lens:
Total visits: 174 visits Total pageviews: 256 pageviews Pages/visit: 1.47
O-ho. Squidoo's decided pages/visit is important!
EDIT: Oh, but what IS pages/visit? No, it's not how many times your visitor comes back to the page, as I had thought. Fluffanutta explains: each lens now has sub-pages aka "Module pages," so this gives you an idea how often visitors are going to those pages as well as the main lens.
Lakeeerieartist has a great lens explaining Module Pages and what they're good for.
Yep, back in the saddle. Dissertation is keeping me busy! However, I've hit a few modest SEO tips in the course of updating and making some new lenses.
First up: CLONE YOUR VISITOR.
This is an idea I'm trying, not yet proven, but it makes sense to me.
Situation: A series of lenses, a sequence of lenses that are all linked up, like different pages of an article.
Query: Which of them should you give the best keyword phrase to for the URL/title?
In the past, I've given it to the first page, the gateway lens, so to speak. But that's linear thinking.
Welcome back to the third and final segment of my “Lensrank secrets” study. In Part I we squeezed the Squidoo FAQ for every scrap of information it could tell us about lensrank. In Part II, we tackled the Squidoo Dashboard stats, on the theory that most of those factor into lensrank (the FAQ showed that many do). Whether or not they are all lensrank factors, they certainly give us a lot of clues about how to improve and promote our Squidoo lenses.
Now I’m going to finish up with an in-depth look at the “individual lens stats” part of the Squidoo Dashboard.
In my last post I dissected the Squidoo FAQ to squeeze out every bit of official information about lensrank.
There's another possible source of official lensrank information right under our noses: the Squidoo Dashboard. I submit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that Squidoo is not expending great gobs of computing and hosting power calculating and storing lens stats for our sole benefit. Most of these stats measure factors alluded to in the FAQ. I suspect that most if not all of our Squidoo Dashboard stats are lensrank factors. We don’t know which carry the most weight, and the lensrank algorithm changes from time to time, but dashboard stats tell us a lot about what Squidoo, at least, thinks is important for an effective webpage.
So let’s dig deeper and see what the Squidoo Dashboard has to tell us.
I recommended ICDSoft to my Mom for HER business. That's how much I trust ICDSoft. $6/mo + $5/year for domain registration.