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

• 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.

So my tips and suggestions here can get you from raw beginner to intermediate, but not expert SEO level.

However, there’s something else I’ve learned a lot about: Squidoo in general! How to build lenses. What looks good. I probably know as much about Squidoo modules as any ordinary member, since I did a test drive of every Squidoo module in 2008 and again this November.

So I’ve created a new “Lensblography” blog: a lensography of all my lenses done as a blog. Partly, as you should guess, it’s to build backlinks to my lenses. Partly it’s to help fans find my old lenses.

But on each lens, I’m going to share THREE things you may find useful:

• What I Learned Making This Lens
• What I Didn’t Learn Making This Lens
• Lens Stats and Milestones

So check out Greekgeek’s Lensblography in the weeks to come. I’ve got two lenses reviewed so far.

I also feel like bragging, although I am actually a little surprised at one of the purple stars I just found in my inbox. It’s not my best lens. I suppose it’s unique content, though!

So here are all my Purple Stars and other Squidoo awards, plus a few personal benchmarks for which I am proud.

The Purple Stars

• Make a Fancy Table of Contents (5.29.09) I put a buttload of work into making this tutorial beautiful as well as useful.
• The Great Blizzard of 1978 (11.16.09) Just a fun lens about a piece of history I lived through.
• Convert Your Prius to a Plug-in Hybrid (11.21.09) Who found this?! It’s one of my oldest lenses, a somewhat dated report on the very first commercially-available kit to turn a regular into a plug-in hybrid.
• Greekgeek Squidoo Tips: How to Get Your Lens Found ( I think and hope this lens and its 2 sequels have helped a lot of new Squidoo lensmasters.
• How to Make a Pyramid Kite (12.9.09) Woot! I first built this webpage in ’94 as a cool “here’s something I know — use it!” gift to the web. I’ve always been proud of this lens, despite its simplicity.

The Lens of the Day(s)

The first one was nominated barely two weeks after I started on Squidoo, and is still the cornerstone of my Squidoo presence. The second one is a rare case in which I self-nominated, but I had a good reason: (a) Jackie Robinson Day was coming up and (b) the lens donates its earnings to his charity, so I was eager to get it in the spotlight.

• Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal (Lens created 5.5.07,  Made LOTD on 5.17.07)
• Jackie Robinson: An American Hero (Made LOTD in early April ’09)

Ancient Greece Odyssey also made 5th place runner-up for Lens of the Year 2007, and won Best Travel Lens in 2008. It has also been reviewed by several lensmaster blogs!

Giant Squid Community Showcase

• Funny Signs and Bizarre Billboards As so often, I had no idea this lens had been nominated until I noticed the traffic stats sending me fresh traffic. This would’ve been September ’08.

Top 100 Lenses

• Ancient Greece Odyssey: A Traveler’s Journal 220 days in the Top 100, currently at 91.  Best rank: #3.
• Greekgeek’s Squidoo Tips: How to Get Your Lens Found 200 days in the Top 100, currently at 61. Best rank: #8.
• SquidU Lensmaster Lounge Help 72 days in Top 100, currently 1111. Best rank #29.
• Make a Fancy Table of Contents 50 days in Top 100, currently 3094. Best rank #3.
• Volcanoes Are Hot Stuff, 31 days on top 100, currently 7503. Best Rank: #31.
• Jackie Robinson: An American Hero 36 days on Top 100, currently 8500. Best Rank: #6.

As you can see, about half my “Best” lenses are Squidoo-related, but I’m happy to see that half of them are simply on topics I’m passionate about. Although really I’m such a CSS Addict that “Fancy Table of Contents” counts, too.

Random Traffic and Ratings

• Ancient Greece Odyssey lifetime visits: 19160 (adding all the other chapters, it’s about  40,000). 200 ratings.
• Greekgeek’s Squidoo Tips: 20193 lifetime visits, 826 ratings.
• Funny Signs: 26307 visits, 28 ratings. LOTS of search engine traffic, even though I knew nothing about SEO when I made it!
• How to Make a Pyramid Kite: 19797 lifetime visits, 15 ratings. Another pre-SEO lens that just happene to grab keywords.
  
• Fancy Table of Contents: only 4600 visits, but it was made 7 months ago and has 258 ratings!

Okay, that’s enough stats. I’m not so interested in pay, but if you want to know more about ALL my lenses and stats, see Greekgeek’s Squidoo Stats for pay days and breakdowns of my lenses from best to worst.

But WAIT! Back up. See what I said back there? Add a Featured Lenses module to your other quizzes. Or any sort of links to your lenses on related topics!

I think this could be very powerful for SEO. I didn’t figure out the system until lens #3, but I soon realized there’s an SEO trick staring us in the face.

1. Identify a keyword on one of your popular lenses
2. Make a Squidoo Quiz TARGETING that keyword, with the keyword in the lens title, lens image filename, and module titles
3. LINK back to your popular lens with the keyword in the anchor text
4. Rinse, repeat!

This is something like the blog effect. Google tends to like backlinks from fresh content, so links from blog posts are great for SEO. SquidQuizzes are so quick and easy to build you can do one or two an hour. No, it’s not as fast as submitting to random directories, but how much weight does Google really place on StumbleUpon entries (which are nofollow) or Digg entries (which are cloaked behind a Diggbar)? The keywords on the SquidQuiz lens demonstrate that it’s relevant to your keywords, and the link then passes that keyword-SEO juice back to the mother lens.

So what do you think? I’m going to give it a try.

Tonight I have made:

• Greek Mythology Trivia Quiz
• Greek Mythology Quiz: Athena
• Greek Mythology Quiz: Apollo

I’m going to make a few more, then create a navigator bar in the introduction of each module linking them all together. I’ll add a Featured Lenses module at the bottom of each lens reminding visitors of the other lenses.

Linkbuilding is a necessary part of SEO, but people waste so much time building links on sites that are nofollow or not particularly relevant to their content, thus passing little or no backlink value. How about linkbuilding by building Squidoo lenses, each of which promotes all the other lenses it links to AND earns you a royalty? Lazy Lensmaster SEO says: YES!

However, for a week or so now, I’ve hit a new threshold that I want to toot my horn about:

18-20 lenses in the top tier, every day, and
Four lenses in the Top 100.

That’s out of about 80 lenses.

I want to thank Squid Angels profusely. You’re not the only reason my lenses are doing well (I hope!), but I know that the current batch of Squid Angels has been very, very actve. I’ve seen a lot of you stopping by some of my successful lenses and showering pixie dust — openly or (I suspect) covertly. Thank you so much.

Finally, my Jackie Robinson lens, which has spent two years wandering around in the 20,000-50,000 lensrank range before my recent efforts got it into the 1000-2000 range, is now rank six.

I feel guilty about submitting it for Lens of the Day. But I always thought it was one of my best lenses, and I knew from clickouts it had been submitted before. With Jackie Robinson Day coming up again this year, I couldn’t resist plugging it! Now, thanks to the LOTD nomination and recent traffic, that lens will finally be sending more than eight cents a month (or a bit more if someone buys memorabilia) to the Jackie Robinson Foundation.  Thank you again, everyone!

For far too much info on my Squidoo traffic, tiers, stats, see my Greekgeek’s Squidoo Stats lens, which is probably pretty typical for an experienced Squidoo user who’s not doing affiliate marketing.