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From Last friday (the 9th) till this coming Friday (the 16th) Troy and I will each build ten lenses.

The lenses will follow the following rules:

- Promote a product from Amazon related to the ‘fitness’ category.
- Use only Squidoo Modules and Squidoo’s Amazon Links

One month from Friday, May 16th, the group of lenses with the most Pending $$ on the Dashboard will be judged to be the winner.

The Variable that we are testing is that I will be focusing on lower cost items and hoping to make a large number of sales, while Troy will be focusing more on big ticket items in the hopes of landing a few monster commissions.

The Fluffanutta will be the impartial Judge in order to ensure fairness

I’ll post a few example lenses later so you guys can see what we are building. May the best Amazon Sales Lensbuilder win

1. Google Maps Module – No guarantee that it helps your google maps ranking in search results but I’ve seen promising things. Also, make sure and put the address of your location in the description area as well, so that it’s easily indexable.

2. ‘Contact Us’ – I have used Black Box modules for the ‘Contact Us’ area before but there are many that would work. Important things to include here : Phone, Hours of Operation, Fax, etc.

3. ‘Services Offered’ – I usually use a text module for this one. Make sure and include keyword rich descriptions of your services as you can easily score on long tail search terms for your location + service .

Want an Example? Here’s a lens I recently built for my lawyer in Las Cruces. It was indexed and receiving traffic within about 48 hours of publishing and has steadily been climbing the ranks for the last week or so.

However, after encouragement from a few of my Squidoo buds I’ve decided to move forward and apply for what might possibly be the most awesome SquidGroup ever (If I get Picked )!!

Board Games.

Why it could be awesome -

People love board games.
There are a zillion of them.
They have rabid communities who love to talk about them.
I love board games. a lot.

I’m mentioning all of this because I wanted to get a straw poll from you guys and see if anyone was interested in building some board game lenses with me.

I’ve decided that regardless of whether I get accepted into SquidClubs this time around or not, I’m going to go ahead and move forward with creating one of the most comprehensive collections of board game information around, all in lens format.

A Lens cloud of board games, totally wicked.

It will be fun, interesting, and probably profitable as well.

If this sounds like something you’d like to join in on (I’ll probably be using a lot of board game lenses as examples in my upcoming posts after I finish off a series on local lenses I have planned for the next week or so) then please drop a line in the comments.

Who knows, your comment might be the one that makes a Board Game SquidClub a reality !

Got your own idea for a SquidClub? (apply Here)

-Cap

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?

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