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.)

• 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!

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

This URL has 1000+ links from 6 domains.

• angelfire.com 1
• annbrundigestudio.com 20
• digg.com 1
• mythphile.com 25
• squidu.com 952
• squidutils.com 1

(Once again demonstrating the  limitations of social media for SEO, since the links from StumbleUpon, Del.ici.ous. Tagfoot and others don’t show up.)

1000+ backlinks is pretty good, right? Well, yeah, assuming (a) all search engines see the same backlinks as Yahoo Site Explorer (the database SquidUtils uses), and (b) all search engines count those links as relevant. But of course, they don’t.

Checking my Swoosty SEO Tools Firefox Add-on…

(Pagerank 4, not bad, could be better…)

Links according to Google:

• 40, of which 36 are other Squidoo lenses, 4 on my Mom’s blog.

Digg doesn’t show up. That ancient Angelfire site I’ve had since the dawn of the web isn’t listed. More troublingly, my blogs started 8 months (this blog) and 2 months ago don’t count, even though Google indexes their new posts within an hour.

Note that Googling for link:http://www.squidoo.com/lensname may not does not give all the backlinks that Google considers relevant for ranking in search results. I know Google search results occasionally turn up SquidU posts, so it’s seeing those signature links. [EDIT: Fluff explains why Google's link: search doesn't show all the links Google knows about.]

But this test is a sobering wake-up call that using Yahoo tools to count backlinks for Google optimization purposes is like using a German dictionary to translate a French menu.

Okay, it’s no secret that I am better at on-page SEO than backlink-building. But my “Free Web Graphics” lens (and the blogs mentioning it) are less than a year old. How about…

Test #2: A More Established Lens

Ancient Greece Odyssey is a less-searched topic, but it’s been around since May 2007. It’s got pagerank 5 instead of 4, for what little that is worth.

SquidUtils backlink checker:

• This URL has 595 links from 64 domains.

That’s half the number of links, but 10 times the number of different domains.

Google link checker:

• 28 links, of which only TWO are from non-Squidoo pages, but they’re my older blogs which are relevant to the lens topic. Surprisingly, one of those links was from Livejournal, which I don’t often hear of as a good blogging platform for SEO purposes, whereas only my older WordPress blogs showed up (the ones 2 and 8 months old didn’t, though Google indexes new posts on them promptly).

Among the Squidoo pages that Google’s link: search turned up as links pointing to my lens, I notice a few things:

• Some but not all of my lenses turn up. I am stymied as to which lenses get chosen — they’re not all highly-ranked, they don’t all many backlinks, and at least one of them is old, stale, un-trafficked, and hasn’t changed much since 2007. Hm.
• Lenses with links to my lenses in Plexos did not turn up. I wonder whether Google demotes big lists o’ links.
• Lenses with regular updates tend to get listed. If you haven’t built a “Latest Ten Lenses” lens, do it now.
• The Squidoo tag page for the PRIMARY TAG was listed.
• Other Lensmaster profiles with Ancient Greece Odyssey listed FIRST under Favorites turn up.  Checking Webconf’s Spider Simulator,  it looks like Google may be giving extra love to the first link on a webpage after the header links.

Edited due to comments: As Fluff points out, just two examples isn’t a big enough sample size to let us draw any sweeping conclusions. And the link: search delimiter doesn’t tell us which links Google recognizes as backlinks for SEO; it just shows us “here are some pages that link to yours”.

But it does at least suggest that a good primary tag and links from other Squidoo lenses may help get your lens seen by Google. When you’re looking for places to build links to your lenses, I would start with lensrolling, featured lens modules, careful choice of the primary tag, and embedding links to your new lens  in the body text of your other lenses.

• 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 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.