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Tier One Lenses: How Much Traffic Do They Need?

Oct 14th, 2010
by Ellen.
2 comments

Challenge Lens Status: LR 5648 today, Oct 14. Started at 84,121 on Oct. 10.

Many factors must sustain a Tier One Lens: a combination of traffic, clickthroughs, community ratings, sales, frequency of updates, and factors Squidoo keeps under its hat. (My guess: visitors interacting with polls, duels, etc; and maybe Squidoo counts it somehow if you’re getting traffic from more different referrers.)

Different types of lenses find a winning formula in different ways, depending on the topic and the working style of the lensmaster.

For example, Jollyvillechick’s 40+ Things My Husband Does Right will probably not be sustained by search engine traffic, unless her mention of battery testers or other specific products in the “he fixes stuff” section catches search engines’ fancy. However, it’s a well-written human interest lens, so it may succeed through social media promotion and word of mouth.

Other people’s lenses succeed through sales and/or extensive social promotion and linkbuilding. Mine succeed primarily through a combination of traffic and clicks, a trickle of Squidoo community ratings, and the rare sale. I also re-publish every 60 days, but I only see a small 3-4 lensrank spike from it, so I don’t rely on update frequency.

Therefore, I need to tackle each of the first four factors.

Let’s talk traffic.

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Getting a Lens to Tier One: Action Plan

Oct 13th, 2010
by Ellen.
1 comment

Not every lens has content that can achieve Squidoo tier one. I have some lenses that aren’t going to get above tier 3, or if they do, it would take tons of social promotion, and they’d drop back down as soon as I stopped.

So when I selected a lens to submit to the Tier One Challenge, I looked carefully for one with the potential to do better. I needed a lens where I knew why it wasn’t succeeding, so I knew how to improve it.

Why it wasn’t succeeding: quiz module content is not indexed by search engines, and it had little else besides pictures, so it was getting no search traffic.

Why it might succeed: Its topic satisfies 5 separate, overlapping searches/audiences: mythology, trivia quizzes, Athena, pictures, and paganism. The topic had the potential for clickthroughs and interaction, and maybe the odd sale. Also, it’s in my primary niche. I have other lenses, blogs, a messy collection of sites and nodes I’ve scattered across the web that can be tapped for traffic and promotion.

Squidoo ratings and social promotion are great, but they are not enough to keep a lens in tier 1. A lens must be self-sustaining.

So now comes work. LOTS OF WORK. What have I done so far to improve my test lens’ chances?

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Old Squidoo Lens Rises from Lensrank 100K to 10K in 7 Days

Oct 12th, 2010
by Ellen.
No comments yet

This is why SquidQuizzes need extra content.

Take a look at what happens to the lensrank of an old SquidQuiz when I supplement it with new content for search engines to pick up. A little promotion doesn’t hurt either.

Average Lensrank –  Nov ’09 to Sep ’10: 105,197

Lensrank – Oct 5 2010: 101,282

Lensrank – Oct 12 2010: 13,824


Ten months in the life of a Squidquiz:

Squidquiz Lensrank by MonthBreakdown from SquidUtils:

Date Lensrank Visits
November 2009 127,995 1
December 2009 93,938 36
January 2010 103,854 66
February 2010 121,585 47
March 2010 110,926 53
April 2010 80,809 51
May 2010 118,422 48
June 2010 89,571 35
July 2010 122,344 43
August 2010 106,551 49
September 2010 103,974 52

Lensrank Last Seven Days:

Squidquiz Lensrank By Day

Breakdown from SquidUtils:

Date Lensrank Visits
30 September 2010 104,110 0
1 October 2010 108,284 0
2 October 2010 109,855 4
3 October 2010 106,819 4
4 October 2010 103,502 6
5 October 2010 101,282 4
6 October 2010 69,496 3
7 October 2010 75,158 1
8 October 2010 80,357 3
9 October 2010 84,138 4
10 October 2010 84,121 6
11 October 2010 25,125 18

So far so good, although most of this is not sustainable since it derives from SquidLikes which wear off in a few weeks.

However, as outlined in the first post for the Tier One Challenge, I’ve been laying the foundations for longterm improvements; the Squidoo social stuff is a side effect and not what I’m targeting. I see single search traffic results from Yahoo, Google, and Ask targeting the new lens content, and a couple visits from the LJ* post I made yesterday.

Today I’m going to work on syndication of Squidcasts and RSS feeds.

I already have a syndicated PR2 Livejournal blog that’s several years old where I announce updates to Ancient Greece Odyssey, so I just announced the quizzes there, and I’ll announce it on Mythphile.com as well, a PR3 site that’s 2.5 years old.

I’m also going to finish updating related lenses, the other Squidquizzes in the series. I did most of them last week, but there’s two still awaiting my attention. They all cross-link to each other, so they need uniform look-and-feel plus good content on all of them, which will attract traffic and drive some to the test quiz.

*(I’m both surprised and relieved that Livejournal, forerunner of MySpace and Facebook, has never registered on SEO / Social Media radar; it’s only a huge social blogging community that’s been around since the 90s! But it’s not designed in an SEO-friendly manner like modern blogging software and sites.)

The Tier One Challenge – Getting a Dud to a Stud

Oct 11th, 2010
by Ellen.
No comments yet

LindaJM has issued a Tier One Challenge:

Choose ONE lens that has never made it into Tier Two… in other words, the highest lensrank ever must be under 10000. The challenge is to do everything you can to get that lens into Tier ONE.

I was surprised and pleased to discover that it was hard to find a Tier 3  (or below) lens that had never been in Tier 2. Yes, there are a few, but I know they just don’t have tier 1 potential.

However, eventually, I found one. It is one of a set of SquidQuizzes I created a year ago while working towards Giant 100. Each of them consisted of:

  • A SquidQuiz (quiz content, created by Javascript, is not indexed by Search Engines)
  • A Text Module with an attractive ad/backlinks to my Greece Odyssey lenses.
  • A Featured Lenses module pointing to the other SquidQuizzes in the series.

Unsurprisingly, they never saw much traffic; most never even reached tier 3. Then Squidquizzes started earning points, two of the series crawled out of the depths into tier 2, and I realized I needed to make them easier or do something to give more value them to Squidoo members, as opposed to for the students I had in mind when I wrote them.

I was in the process of revamping the series when LindaJM issued the challenge. I picked one that I think has the most potential for improvement. I’m going to keep notes here on what I’m doing to improve it, and how its rank changes.

So, here’s its starting condition:

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Five Lens Boost Tips: Beginning of the Month

Oct 4th, 2010
by Ellen.
1 comment

Okay, I admit it. I like my lenses to be in the best payout tier they can be, and I like traffic, two related but separate goals.

So at the beginning of the month, I find myself reviewing my dashboard. In particular, I look for lenses that are starting out near a tier cutoff. I look for lenses with over a hundred visitors per week, yet they’re tier 3. And I look for lenses whose fortunes have recently improved, like, say, my Squidquizzes which you all suddenly discovered last month even though I made them over a year ago. ;)

How can I help them begin the month on good footing, or, much more importantly, help them stay where they are now and not drop?

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My Squidoo Lensrank Has Dropped: and That’s a Good Thing!

Aug 4th, 2010
by Ellen.
No comments yet

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.

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Advanced CSS Tricks and Tips: Borders and Backgrounds and Captions, Oh My!

Jun 7th, 2010
by Ellen.
No comments yet

I finally got around to updating my Advanced CSS lens, where I used to post crazy “lab experiments” in CSS.

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.)

How many Squidoo pages are indexed by Google, Yahoo, et alia?

Jun 5th, 2010
by Ellen.
2 comments

Addendum — just because I’m curious — how many Squidoo pages have the different search engines got indexed?

  • 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!

Updating Squidoo Lenses: Staying Fresh

Jun 3rd, 2010
by Ellen.
2 comments

After 60 (?) days, a lens loses lensrank because it’s not fresh.

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.
  • (more…)

Squidoo Graphics: Colors, Themes, Black Box Tips

Jun 1st, 2010
by Ellen.
No comments yet

I’ve been thinking. Try as I might, I’m a journeyman when it comes to Squidoo SEO: I have the basic techniques down, I know what I’m doing, but I’ve got the online equivalent of an undergraduate college degree rather than a PhD. Whereas I’ve been doing computer graphics and layout since 1980, HTML since 1993, and CSS since–well, whenever it first came out.

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

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