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seo

“My Lensrank or Traffic Is Dropping– Help!”

Apr 13th, 2009
by Ellen.
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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.

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Two Quick Squidoo SEO Tips

Apr 12th, 2009
by Ellen.
1 comment

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!

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.

Basic SEO – How I Do Search Engine Optimization

Apr 8th, 2009
by Ellen.
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Okay, what do I really do for SEO “best practice,” when I’m worrying about SEO and not just slapping stuff up on the web?

After a year or so of exploring search engine optimization practices, here’s the procedure I use for search engine optimization.

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SEO Blunders: Very Un-sexy Search Results

Apr 6th, 2009
by Ellen.
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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…

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LOLCats Guide to SEO

Apr 5th, 2009
by Ellen.
3 comments

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:

Samhain the Cat’s SEO Guide

(THE LOLCAT VERSION)

LOLCAT SEO

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