Adventures in Squidoo, SEO, CSS and Web Design
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!
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.
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.
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.
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