Here’s the steps I took to make this effective lens.

1) Find a controversial subject LOTS of people are talking about, and/or notice something in current news/buzz that people may look up.

I follow space news, and heard there were some new cool photos of moon landing sites. When I searched for them on the web, I ran into a whole pile of people claiming the moon landings are a hoax! (This would be news to my Mom’s friend Neil Armstrong.) A number of people were asking why there were no photos of moon landers from space. Aha! A question that can be answered with a Squidoo lens! Juicy debate and controversy! Perfect for getting traffic. Now, how to target it…

2) Find popular keyword searches for that topic.

First I looked at news posts, blog posts and especially the comments to see what words and phrases people were using to discuss the topic. I paid special attention to questions people were asking in comments, because when people ask questions, they often search the web for answers! I wrote these words, phrases and questions down, then checked their popularity in Google Adwords and Wordtracker to see what people were searching most often.  Finally, I Googled for “allinurl: <keywords>” and “allintitle: <keywords>” to figure out which of these phrases didn’t have too much competition (other webpages optimized to target those keywods).

Remember the golden rule of SEO: find popular search phrases for which there isn’t too much competition!

3) Weave keywords into page title, URL, lens photo’s filename, links, and a few module headers — this is standard Squidoo SEO practice.

My title is actually long– ideally it should be 4-5 words long  — but it’s covering several different popular search phrases.

4) Write entertaining copy that answers the exact questions people were asking.

For example, I noticed some folks asking about photos of the American flag on the moon, so I found a photo that showed it it. I noticed that some critics were complaining about the bright white spots on some of the moon lander photos, caused by major sun glare, so I found a video that illustrates exactly that.

5) Provide LOTS of clickthrough links.

Clickouts are key. Getting visitors to a webpage is step 1. Step 2 is to get them to DO something once they arrive — click links, buy products, view videos, vote in polls, etc. I included links right in the introduction that Mr. Five Second Attention Span might click on, then useful links — again related to the questions people asked on the topic — throughout.  Clickthroughs boost lensrank, and are a vital part of second tier lenses!

6) Get good, free, LEGAL graphics and videos to illustrate the webpage.

NASA images are very handy: since NASA is a US government agency, most of its images are available to the general public for reuse! Check permissions on NASA pages to make sure. This means that space-related topics are a gold mine for Squidoo lenses, since there’s lots of free photos available. See my Free Web Graphics lens for other sources of free images. For ideas about new lenses, you might take the unusual step of collecting interesting images, then writing a lens on that topic!

7. Interactivity (polls, guestbook, etc).

Interactivity increases reader interest in a lens, and the clicks may boost lensrank.

As usual, Seth is simple and short, whereas my own 3-part Squidoo tips tutorial on how to build web traffic is in-depth and too long.

One of Seth’s points jumped out at me:

You have no right to traffic. If you’re lucky, and GOOD, you earn some.

You’ll earn it when you do something daring, interesting, useful, provocative, free, compelling, emotional or urgent.

Hurry.

I’ve said this in other ways, but never quite so bluntly: YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO [WEB] TRAFFIC.

There are millions of fascinating, useful, incredible, wonderful, exactly-what-people-want web pages out there. A web user will never see more than a tiny fraction of them. So why should anyone pick your page, out of all those pages, to visit? Why stay there? Why read it?

It’s up to you to make it worth their time.

I just noticed on my “Is Squidoo a Scam?” lens that someone said he’d made four lenses and hadn’t earned any money in six months, and he was giving up.

On the one hand, it IS hard to get web traffic.

On the other hand, he hadn’t filled in his profile, he only had ONE lens left in his profile, and it was on a very popular topic for which there are over 970,000 webpages, according to Google.

Newbies write on popular topics, thinking they’ll get lots of traffic. They don’t realize that popular topics have thousands if not millions of pages already written on them, and they’re competiting with all those pages.

Okay, I’m preaching to the choir. The point is, you can’t assume a page will get traffic. It really is work to make useful, unique, readable, entertaining, grab-the-visitor-by-the-throat-and-make-them-stay webpages.

What can you do to boost the odds?

• Write on what you LOVE and KNOW. Passion, humor, and real in-depth knowledge shines through.
• Write on things that aren’t the most popular topic. Think of things you’ve looked up online or wondered about. Think about things you know which are off the beaten track. Lionel trains? Your town’s traditions or landmarks? A particular product, book, author, body part or animal? Seek topics that haven’t been done to death.
• Research, research, research. Not only do you want to cover the most important things about your topic, but you should find and link to the best websites and videos on your topic.
• Organization. Make it clear what your page is about, where you’re going to take your reader, and what they’ll get out of your lens right in the introduction.
• See my top ten Squidoo tips for some other ideas about how to make your lens stand out.
• Once in a while, make a list of ten webpages you’ve visited. Then write down the following. What brought you there? Did you read the webpage all the way through? What on the page held your attention?  If you clicked on any links, why did you click them? If you did NOT read the whole page, why? What did you skip? What did NOT hold your attention? Your tastes aren’t everybody’s, but the more you understand what keeps people on a page — and what doesn’t — the more you’ll be able to write successful webpages.

The bottom line: your lens has to be useful, entertaining and/or informative, NOT generic. You have to “earn” your traffic, as Seth puts it.

And then use as much SEO as you can to get your content found.

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.

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.

What if I use the keyword with the highest traffic potential on one of the secondary lens, with a link in the introduction module saying, “Welcome to part 2 of my 3-part series on X. If you’re just tuning in, here’s [link]part 1[/link]”

Why?

Squidoo lensrank is boosted by clicks. If you can entice the visitor to click, you’ve guaranteed yourself a click. Also, you’ve just turned one hit into two, one for each lens. [EDIT: Apparently passing traffic between lenses doesn't count. Squidoo is wise to the tricks we do. But the "double hit" theory holds true.]

Drawbacks:

1. It’s all well and good to use the best-optimized keyword in the URL of lens #2 … who types those anymore? But to optimize it, you also have to include the keyword in the lens title. It may make more sense to have the primary/gateway lens have that title.

On the other hand, it may make more sense to have the popular keyword in the primary/gateway title. You know, the keyword you couldn’t use because too many other pages have optimized for it? Well, this way you can use it, too.

2. Bigger risk: as soon as you are asking visitors to do something— click a link, navigate to a new page, read an advertisement before getting to the content they were really looking for— you test visitor patience. It’s hard enough keeping them on your page. If they don’t see what they want in a hurry, they’ll hit the back button and look elsewhere. So that link to Page 1 needs to look shiny and enticing. The introduction for page 2 needs to be clear, well-written, compelling — to demonstrate you know what you’re doing — and show that yes, what they want really is only a click away.

So I’m not 100% about this method. I have created two pages linked together in this fashion and will be watching to see how many people landing on page 2 click the link for page 1.

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!

Now, let me give you my answer…

Answer: Tagfoot, as far as I can tell, is one of the few social media sites that benefits SEO.

It’s time for me to remind you of that social media links and SEO rant by Michael Martinez of SEO-Theory (you should really read the whole post to understand the context):

“Social media link building is a complete waste of time from a search engine optimization point of view. Even if you know of social media sites that haven’t yet implemented nofollow you don’t know how long that gravy will continue to taste good. Google is chasing your sorry social media linking profile and you need a better plan than that.”  —“Real Advice from Bad SEOs”

How do we know he’s right? How do we know which social networking links still pass the “backlink gravy”?

We need more than just a NoDoFollow Firefox plugin, although that’s a start.

That tells us that links on StumbleUpon, Del.ici.ous, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook are set NoFollow.

NoFollow means that search engines won’t follow or index those links. So for SEO purposes, those links are invisible! Links on those sites won’t boost your webpage’s position in search engine results one jot.

LinkedIn? It depends. The “Website” listed in your profile is Follow, the “Additional Information” section, including “My Websites”, is NoFollow. So, one link from a not-particularly-relevant website with no pagerank. Whoopie.

Reddit? Another “It depends.” Submitted URLs start out Nofollow and may be promoted to Follow if enough people up-vote them. But Reddit members react like antibodies when they sense self-promotion– they will BURY you.

Digg? Ah yes, the holy grail of linkspam. Nevermind that you can get your account suspended for self-promotion on Digg. Links on Digg are Follow, right? Linkbuild me, baby! I can always open a new account!

Except now Digg has implemented an ingenious way of redirecting all the SEO benefit to itself for links submitted to Digg. See The Truth about Digg’s Diggbar, The Digg Toolbar Exposed or 5 Reasons Diggbar Sucks for more information. (In light of their findings, I’ve added a Frame Free WordPress plug-in to block Diggbar from this blog. Nice PR disaster, Digg.)

Tagfoot is the only social networking I’ve found whose bookmarks are set Follow, whose robots.txt file doesn’t block spiders, and which doesn’t ban users for self-promotion. But before you all run out to spam Tagfoot, remember that Tagfoot members will block you or flag you as a spammer if you abuse the system. [[UPDATE June 9, 2009: Tagfoot has set its links to NoFollow for ordinary users, DoFollow for special members. See this post for more info.]]

So, am I saying you should give up on using social networking to promote your (quality!) webpages?

No. My point is that social media sites are lousy for search engine optimization– getting search engines to send you traffic. So don’t bother with SEO tactics on social media sites. When participating in social networking, optimize for humans!

Post a viral video on YouTube or a good photograph on Flickr with a link back to your website, and members of those sites may click on the link, even if search engine spiders ignore it.

Likewise, if you participate in a social media community, recommend good websites, and earn a following, your followers will follow your links even if search engines don’t.

That means investing time in meaningful participation on social networking sites. Interact with people. React to people. Carry on conversations. Read and rate what others are linking to. Retweet. Etc. You can’t cheat with social networking — you have to be social.

You may find that you’d prefer to sink more effort into passive forms of traffic generation — e.g. keyword optimization — which continue to work when you’re busy doing other stuff. With blogs, forums, and social networking, as soon as you stop participating, most of the traffic dies away.

Which brings me back to the point I keep making about building web traffic with social media: join social networking communities if you enjoy being active in online communities! Getting visitor traffic from followers is a secondary return on your (time) investment. Your primary ROI for social networking sites is the enjoyment and satisfaction of social networking.

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.

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.

Even the expert lensmasters are struggling to maintain their highest-ranked lenses in the top tier.
Two of mine have just barely dropped below 2000– they were bumped by two of my other lenses which have moved up! They may cancel out each other’s top tier lensrank at the end of the month unless I can fix this.
I can’t seem to get the ones that dropped to come back; they’re both sitting in the 2000-2200 range.

Steps I’m taking:

Updated it with new, useful information that I know people have asked for, and SquidCasted this fact. [Alert! I have added rounded corners code to my CSS quick reference guide, color codes for a few more colors I've noticed Squidoo using, and links to free tools that let you test how your lens looks on different browsers! Alll this and more on CSS-Codes: Making Your Webpages Look Great! ]