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

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.

Note that it’s against Flickr’s terms of service to use their site to store photos that are simply graphical elements of webpages (titles, banners, buttons), or items you’re trying to sell. But this is an indirect way of drawing in a target audience who may click on your links or products.

Linkbait — making something so compelling, outrageous, attractive or argument-inducing that people are liable to click on the link — is harder. You can’t count on any picture or image going viral, and most don’t. However, if one ever does, it could bring in traffic by the thousands.

Here’s a linkbait I’d been planning to make for a while.

The key is that I didn’t make it just for linkbait. I’ve been wanting to show off my cat’s silly dance for 12 years, ever since she first started amusing me and visitors! But “funny cat videos” — the best ones — tend to enjoy widespread circulation. I included the link in the video itself, just in case people start replicating and distributing it (they shouldn’t, but that’s often what happens with viral videos).

I’ve also posted the raw URL near the top of the video description, where it shows up on YouTube in the video’s sidebar above the “More…” link. I’m already getting some traffic from there. Cool slideshows and fun videos can thus be embedded on your lens, and drive traffic to your lens.

1. In traffic stats, I change the window to 30-day-traffic and add any keyword phrase to my Squidoo Tags that’s been searched 4-5 times, if I haven’t got it already. This won’t help much with Google, which doesn’t put much stock in Squidoo tags, but it may help with MSN and Yahoo (once Yahoo rediscovers Squidoo). Don’t forget you need to PUBLISH a lens again after adding tags!
2. I make note of my chosen keywords and the top 2-3 searches for my lens. I then add each as alt-tags to one image on my lens, in a module talking about that topic, or a graphic that illustrates it.  I may even delete an image, change its filename on my computer to a better keyword (use hyphens to separate words, e.g. picture-of-stork.jpg), upload it again and change the HTML to point to the new filename. Both these methods are using images to attract search engine traffic.

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.

Now, here’s two quick tips to help tweak the your SEO of existing Squidoo pages — and give it a lensrank boost to boot!

Keywords and Alt-Tags: Match ’Em Up

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!

Keywords: Plural Is Better Than Singular

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!

Lensrank Boost?

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.