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Responding to Traffic Stats and Visitor Searches

Oct 20th, 2010
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

LisaAuch asked a good question in SquidU on how we update lenses (which could apply to any kind of webpage). My answer got longwinded, so I'm posting it here!

95% of the time, I confess, I assume I made a good page and don't update much. I'll just skim titles and images to see if anything jumps out at me that I could tweak. I'll trim a word or two since I tend to be longwinded. Then I hit publish.

During the 5% of the time when I decide to make a significant update, it's for one of four reasons:

  1. I have new content to add
  2. I've decided to improve the graphics and appearance,
  3. I've decided to improve the on-page optimization to increase traffic, or
  4. I want to add things people are more likely to want to click on (which boosts lensrank).

With 3, it's often because I've learned a new SEO method I didn't know before. For example, using words and phrases from searches related to my main keyword, rewriting titles so that the most significant keywords are at the start, or reviewing images to make sure their filenames and alt-names are concrete words and phrases like "pictures of the statue of liberty" that people are more likely to search for (as opposed to, "liberty").

One time consuming but powerful method is to

use traffic stats as clues on how to improve a lens

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Tier One Lenses: How Much Traffic Do They Need?

Oct 14th, 2010
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

Challenge Lens Status: LR 5648 today, Oct 14. Started at 84,121 on Oct. 10.

Many factors must sustain a Tier One Lens: a combination of traffic, clickthroughs, community ratings, sales, frequency of updates, and factors Squidoo keeps under its hat. (My guess: visitors interacting with polls, duels, etc; and maybe Squidoo counts it somehow if you're getting traffic from more different referrers.)

Different types of lenses find a winning formula in different ways, depending on the topic and the working style of the lensmaster.

For example, Jollyvillechick's 40+ Things My Husband Does Right will probably not be sustained by search engine traffic, unless her mention of battery testers or other specific products in the "he fixes stuff" section catches search engines' fancy. However, it's a well-written human interest lens, so it may succeed through social media promotion and word of mouth.

Other people's lenses succeed through sales and/or extensive social promotion and linkbuilding. Mine succeed primarily through a combination of traffic and clicks, a trickle of Squidoo community ratings, and the rare sale. I also re-publish every 60 days, but I only see a small 3-4 lensrank spike from it, so I don't rely on update frequency.

Therefore, I need to tackle each of the first four factors.

Let's talk traffic.

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Controversies & Hoaxes Draw Web Traffic

Jan 9th, 2010
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

My Photos of Apollo Moon Landing Sites From Space lens has existed for a month, and looks to be a long-term second-tier lens with 50 visitors a week and a fair number of clicks. Those two factors will help this lens maintain its lensrank.

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...

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"You Have No Right to Traffic"

Jan 3rd, 2010
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

I was just rereading Seth Godin's The Nine Free Things Every Site (Or Lens!) Should Do, which is the link SquidU's Answer Deck gives you if you click "How do I get more traffic?"

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.

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My Purple Stars and Other Squidoo Awards

Dec 2nd, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

Wow! Where are these purple stars coming from! This is a HUGE huge huge thank you to everyone who has nominated my lenses for purple stars, Lens of the Day, and other Squidoo awards.

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.

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SEO Experiment - Make One Hit Worth Two

Nov 8th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

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.

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Which Social Media Sites Benefit SEO?

May 6th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
8 comments

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!

Which Social Media sites help SEO?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Now, let me give you my answer...

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Images and Videos as Linkbait!

May 3rd, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

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.

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Two More Quick Squidoo SEO Tips

Apr 19th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

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.

  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.

"My Lensrank or Traffic Is Dropping-- Help!"

Apr 13th, 2009
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

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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