Adventures in Squidoo, SEO, CSS and Web Design
Squidoo tags are funny beasts. They work in two entirely different ways: on Squidoo, as a way to cross-link lenses together, and in search engines, they help target search traffic. Just to be more complicated, we've got some conflicting info on how, exactly, search engines handle meta keywords, which for our purposes are Squidoo tags.
It's time to sort out Squidoo tags and how to use 'em.
I just made a new lens on a popular funny YouTube video, the "Antwerp Train Station Sound of Music" prank.
If you haven't seen the video, you need to-- it'll make you smile. VERY effective. So far it's gotten nearly 13 million hits, and that's not counting all the duplicate copies floating around on YouTube plus a few million more on various European YouTube sites.
It's a great case study in "linkbait," content that's so good people start linking to it. (Also known as "viral," since linkbait this good can spread by word-of-mouth to millions of web users within days, even hours).
It also illustrates an SEO blunder.
Yep, back in the saddle. Dissertation is keeping me busy! However, I've hit a few modest SEO tips in the course of updating and making some new lenses.
First up: CLONE YOUR VISITOR.
This is an idea I'm trying, not yet proven, but it makes sense to me.
Situation: A series of lenses, a sequence of lenses that are all linked up, like different pages of an article.
Query: Which of them should you give the best keyword phrase to for the URL/title?
In the past, I've given it to the first page, the gateway lens, so to speak. But that's linear thinking.
When a newbie asks how to build web traffic, one of the first pieces of advice they’ll hear is to submit their URL to StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.ici.ous, and other social media sites.
I got the same advice. I bought into it. But does social media/social networking really benefit SEO (search engine optimization)?
Hey, let me be social and ask you, the readers!
Loading ...Now, let me give you my answer...
In SEO Blunders: Very Un-sexy Search Results, I showed off my first Stupid SEO Trick! I’d decided not to worry too much about optimizing this blog, since I don't want to shell out the money for a second webhost and domain name (a URL is the best spot for keyword optimization after page title). However, I did at least want to optimize well enough that people searching for my blog by title would find it-- all the more important since the domain name doesn’t match.
Unfortunately, I forgot one of my favorite tricks: make sure your keyword’s first appearance on your webpage is in a sentence that reads well when Google excerpts it in search results.
I took steps to correct the problem. To some extent, my corrections helped, but I still haven’t got it quite right. So here’s another quick lesson in how to shape your search engine results to make them look sexy-- or at least what NOT to do.
Hey, it happens to all of us. You wake up, check the dashboard, and-- eek! Traffic on lens X is going down, and lens Y is now in a lower lensrank tier than it was yesterday. I want to throw a question out to my readers: what steps do YOU take, reflexively, to combat lensrank and traffic bleed?
I'm not talking about the best steps, in theory. I'm talking about what you do, for good or ill. And consider why you do them, and whether you know they work, or you're just hopin' or have "heard it works", which a lot of us SEO journeymen do too often.
Confesssion time: here's my "flail at traffic and lensrank" list. Some of these are good ideas, some of them "here's hopin'."
This is a tweaked version of a post I made at SquidU today answering the question.
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.
Remember how I talked about "making your search results look sexy" in my lens on Squidoo and SEO?
I noted that the two-line blurb that shows up in Google search results is your big chance to "sell" your page to the searching public:
A juicy, "I want to read more!" excerpt is what you want people to see. You can’t necessarily bait every possible “long tail” search phrase with juicy verbal bait, but at least make sure your keywords first appear in a sentence that shows off what your page has to offer.
Did I pay attention to my own advice when making this blog?
Look! Look! It took 1 day to get my Squidbits blog to the top spot on Google, even though there's a surprising number of webpages out there about "Squid bits"!
There's just one... little... problem...
I realize my first few posts on this blog are awfully dense, and the next one promises more of same.
So it’s time to shake things up a little with my first guest blogger, none other than Samhain the Cat!
Samhain is a real pro when it comes to getting noticed, and she’ll be the first to tell you she’s at the top of any meaningful search. Of course, she’s also an expert at NOFOLLOW— you’ll never find her with any search engine on the planet, when she doesn’t want to be found!
So without further ado, let me vacate the keyboard so she can give you:
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