The Price of Failure
Arr... This Be The Captain! Thanks for Stopping by to check out my piratey bag of Squidoo Tricks! If you are new here, you might want to get free updates and squidoo tricks delivered straight to you via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
As some of you know, I’ve basically disappeared off the face of the Squidoo-verse for the last 4 months or so.
I was working on one of my most aggressive entrepreneurial projects ever.
It totally crashed and burned over the last few weeks.
Failing is something I do on a regular basis with various things, but I’m not going to lie, this one stung a bit. Besides the lost money (significant) and time (also significant) pulling out of a project like that definitely knocks your confidence and pride back a few notches.
Another unfortunate consequence is that I’ve also been neglecting my Squidoo happenings and adventures, which I can never get the time back for.
I’ll probably keep licking my wounds for the next few days or so and then I’m going to return to the basics that started making me money online in the first place, building some lenses.
Hopefully there are a few of you still around that check in every once in a while that I can share the adventure with 
.
Failure sucks, but never failing once is way worse.
The only disaster in this situation would be me giving up trying. Which isn’t going to happen.
T-A-G-S Spells Lens Indexing
I know i seem to cover this idea ad nauseum but I wanted to emphasize (again) the importance of tagging your lenses properly.
Why do we tag lenses?
Tag pages are one of the backbones of Squidoo’s site infrastructure. Not only do many features within Squidoo use the relationships from tag pages (Discovery Tool) but tag pages are also one of the primary tools for getting your lens indexed.
What is Indexing and why is it important?
When Google or Bing or any other search engine sends it’s ’spiders’ out to crawl the web, they take note of pages that have unique content that their searchers might find useful (i.e. your lenses). It piles all of these pages together and uses a bunch of ranking factors to pull out the best pages to present to users of the engines when they make queries.
If a spider can’t find your lens, it won’t be added to this pile of documents.
So, initially when we build lenses we want to create as many pathways (links) as possible for the spider to find our freshly published content.
Leveraging Squidoo’s existing structure to do this is by far and away the easiest way to have lots of pathways lined up for spiders to find your content.
Squidoo is being crawled constantly by google ( I shudder to think of the bandwidth bill Squidoo has for bots alone..) and as such you want to get in the path that the spider is wandering down.
What does every page on squidoo have? Tags.
Do spiders follow links to tag pages? Yes.
If you use tags that are used by many other lenses, is it more likely that your lens will be picked up quickly in the search engines? In my 1000+ lenses my experience is yes.
So,
DO
Use tags that are relevant to your lens topic
Use tags that are present on other lenses
TIP:
*For new lenses the sweet spot seems to be tags that are used on between 10 and 50 other lenses*
DON’T
Base your tags on some ‘keyword list’ unless that list was built off of squidoo tags, NOT some search log.
use too many long or unique tags unless you are building a lens cloud that will all use similar tags.
Questions?
…And We’re Back
Hey All, due to some unforseen real life craziness, I’ve been unable to be a good Captain and keep you all up to date on the latest ways to kick butt on Squidoo.
The most recent burst of craziness appears to be slowing down microscopically, so I anticipate being able to get back into the quest full swing this coming week.
Stay tuned for some juicy tips and updates, they are on the way!!
I’ve also been hanging out in the Chat Room a lot more lately so feel free to stop by there and Say hi to the crew if you are feeling lonely.