Squidoo Tips

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Comment by Valerie Robertson on March 9, 2009 at 8:54am

TheFluffanutta, one of Squidoo Masters' members, runs SquidUtils and has a lot of great Squidoo lens utilities. He developed RSS Pipes for Squidoo lenses. Here's my rss pipes for lenses based on freshness. Now they these RSS pipes show your lens title and an exercept and directly link to your lens. Check it out at SquidUtils. Just register and get started!

Comment by Valerie Robertson on March 9, 2009 at 8:44am

You might consider added a Google bot into the top right 'My Bio' module. This places the date the last time Google spidered your lens. Google mentionned that the crawl rate is dependent upon many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, parameters in a URL etc., but you'll need to gauge this time frame for each lens.

Probably the best action is to update at least once a week on high ranking, high traffic lenses and less on the lower ranking lenses.

Comment by Valerie Robertson on March 9, 2009 at 8:38am

Here's a better link checker. I just tick the Summary box.

Comment by Valerie Robertson on March 9, 2009 at 8:21am

This is a copy and paste of a discussion I had with Katinka:

Part I

I've done something rather controversial and unusual over the past couple of months and that is fine tuning my lenses to raise them in squidoo rankings and deleting ones that always languished. Now I kept the lenses I thought I could elevate.

The results have been quite good. In the past month, for instance, I doubled my Squidoo traffic and at least doubled my Squidoo earnings for January and tripled them for February!

Now there are benefits to having over 100 lenses, however I felt I had to deal with the lenses I had before tackling adding more lenses. I did eventually add, during the months of January and February, about ten new lenses.

Comment by Valerie Robertson on March 9, 2009 at 8:21am

Culling Squidoo Lenses Part II

I have the Featured Lens module in many of my lenses and did have to go in and delete the now non-existant lens. That reminds me that it might be a good idea to utilize a dead link checker to check your lenses and see if you need to eliminate any dead links.

When I deleted the lenses with poor rankings i.e. 80,000 and over it pushed my overall rankings in a positive way and pushed a few lenses into the profitable (below 2000 group). So it certainly did pay off.

I now have 57 lenses with an average lens rank of 17,865, putting me into the top 2.5 to 3% of high ranking Squidoo lenses. It seems you have to work like a fool to get into the below 2000 ranking and stay there consistently. A month ago I had an average lens rank of around 25,000, but the culling boosted my lenses moving into the profitable under 2000 lens rank from 3 to 4 to 10 or 11, depending on any given day.

The second thing I did was to revisit search engine optimization. A while back I dabbled with it and it backfired. This time it seemed I was able to absorb the information on SEO and implement it. Just yesterday I tested some of my more hefty lenses on 'page load analysis' and had to do some image and advert culling also.

I did noticed whenever I deleted a lens that wasn't doing well, rank-wise, that the effect was quite positive. But, first I try to rework the lens to see if it can be saved first. Afterall, one puts a lot of time and effort into building a lens in the first place, so I like to give it one last chance before it's executed!

You can check out my lensmaster page to verify what I've said in terms of rankings placement.

Comment by Valerie Robertson on March 4, 2009 at 10:02am

Here is an example of how the floating pictures works with the text off to the side. Great for eliminating all those gaps! I used this on my Winnie the Pooh lens.

Comment by Katinka Hesselink on March 2, 2009 at 8:15am

:) you're welcome.

Comment by Valerie Robertson on March 2, 2009 at 5:57am

Katinka I really liked you lens Squidoo CSS and the floating text or pictures with text immediately to the side instead of above or below. I'm off to update my lenses now. Well done!

Comment by Katinka Hesselink on November 20, 2008 at 6:12am

I agree yahoo answers is a great place to promote lenses. The links are not followed, so they should not help for google - but especially if your answer is chosen as best answer, you will get good clickthrough rates. And if the question you commented on is the one google for some reason likes best, IT will turn up in the search engine results, which should bring you decent traffic.

Comment by Valerie Robertson on November 19, 2008 at 7:02pm

I'd like to add to what Katinka said. When you find a blog that allows comments with a link back to your lens, make sure your comment has relevant keywords so that it will pull up your comments in search results and hence the possibility of someone clicking on your link to your lens. Yes, Google will display comments to blogs. So, in essence your comment should be at least 4 sentences and have keyword density and relevancy to the blog you just commented on, and, of course, if the blog you're commenting on has good page rank, then all the better! I love the Google page rank toolbar.

I consider commenting on Yahoo Answers a great way to get pulled up in Google Searches. Keep in mind, Yahoo Answers doesn't like if you insert affiliate links into the comment, but you can reference in an affiliate link in the section below i.e. url references. You can reference a link to your lens in the main body of your Yahoo Answer if it helps the reader in understanding the answer to their question. Clear as Mud! Well try out Yahoo Answers for yourself ...

Here's my lens tips on Search Engine Optimization plus SEO toolbars.

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