How to Squidoo, SEO, and My Squidoo Odyssey
Doot de dooo. Time to check the dashboard and see how the lenses are doing. Hm hm hm, good good, hey, that’s one’s back in the second tier, and…
WHAT? 300 visits + recent sales = THIRD TIER? Oh, Squidoo, I am WOUNDED TO THE QUICK!
You’re picking on me! No, wait, you’ve changed the lens algorithm to cheat me out of my rightful lensrank! It’s a conspiracy! It’s a bug! It’s inconceivable!
And it’s been happening with that particular lens a lot lately.
In fact, this is a VERY good thing.
I was discouraged when I found a Squidoo lensmaster taking designs from my Squidoo Graphics lens and selling them on Zazzle, ignoring the Creative Commons license I posted on that lens. I didn’t feel like making new graphics, after that. However, I’ve recently been inspired again.
Recently, a newbie asked if there were Squidoo banners one could download. I started to send him to the official Squidoo banners downloads lens, but I saw that none of those graphics are really banners. So I made some and posted a new Squidoo Banners For You lens.
So what? Is this just a transparent link-drop? No, actually, I want to teach you a little about graphics, so you understand what I’m doing, and more importantly, so you understand what you are doing when you resize, save, or use a graphic.
Disclaimer: The Squidoo logo is a trademark of Squidoo LLC. This blog is not endorsed by/affiliated with Squidoo LLC.
When I started using SEO for Squidoo lenses systematically, I latched onto Webconf’s 15 Minute SEO checklist.
It was the first recommended resource I included on my Squidoo SEO lens in ’07.
Webconfs’ SEO checklist is oversimplified, of course. It was also written 4 years ago, which is eons in web terms; most search engines will have changed and refined their algorithms since that checklist was written.
Nevertheless, looking back at that page, I still agree with most of their suggestions, even if I think some things are more or less important than they do.
I think that to date, the Squidoo Museum is my best lens as far as presentation, although the Fancy Table of Contents lens comes close.
I’d like to talk about how I put together the Squidoo Museum. It demonstrates everything I know about graphics, color, fonts, and CSS.
I finally got around to updating my Advanced CSS lens, where I used to post crazy “lab experiments” in CSS.
Now I’ve reorganized it and made it more dignified (slightly), and added all the tricks I tend to use most on my lenses: rounded corners, background-images for paragraphs, captions under aligned images, drop caps, dramatic numbered lists, and most of all, playing around with the introduction module to make the first thing visitors see look great.
I’ve moved the old lab experiments to page 2. There’s another use for a Page Break!
(My “crazy lab experiments” lens is now ZEE CODE SCRATCHPAD. Once I’ve got things working nicely there, I may move the “finished products” to the AdvancedCSS lens for prime time viewing.)
Addendum — just because I’m curious — how many Squidoo pages have the different search engines got indexed?
Again, I don’t think Google’s spiders are less effective than Yahoo’s — no WAY — but it tosses an awful lot of pages into the “suppemental index” if they seem not to give any good info that can’t be found on other pages on the same website. I.E. if you make a lens that’s just like a ton of lenses, don’t expect it to get seen in Google search results!
To figure out if your lens is indexed, use one of the searches above, then add the title of your lens!
After 60 (?) days, a lens loses lensrank because it’s not fresh.
Also, Google rewards frequently updated content.
These are two separate things, but they go together.
What are your techniques for keeping lenses fresh?
Here’s some of mine.
I’ve been thinking. Try as I might, I’m a journeyman when it comes to Squidoo SEO: I have the basic techniques down, I know what I’m doing, but I’ve got the online equivalent of an undergraduate college degree rather than a PhD. Whereas I’ve been doing computer graphics and layout since 1980, HTML since 1993, and CSS since–well, whenever it first came out.
So I should share more of my tips on graphics and webpage design. Here’s a few!
This is a huge question. Different tools find different backlinks. For example, checking my Free Web Graphics — How to Get Them (Legally!) lens on SquidUtils’ Backlink Checker, I get this:
This URL has 1000+ links from 6 domains.
(Once again demonstrating the limitations of social media for SEO, since the links from StumbleUpon, Del.ici.ous. Tagfoot and others don’t show up.)
1000+ backlinks is pretty good, right? Well, yeah, assuming (a) all search engines see the same backlinks as Yahoo Site Explorer (the database SquidUtils uses), and (b) all search engines count those links as relevant. But of course, they don’t.
There have been a few recent modules added to the Squidoo module browser. They’re listed under “new” at the bottom, but haven’t been filed under any category, so the only way to find them is to click “Browse all modules” and then search for them by name. They are:
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.