Gil announced that Squidoo has removed the no-follow links located in certain modules (About Me, My Lenses, Text with Big Picture).

MORE interesting,

RSS has had No-Follow ADDED to it. Before the changes there was absolutely no reason for RSS to have no-follow applied to RSS modules, as the entire module was rendered in a way that effectively makes it invisible to Search Engines anyway.

HOWEVER, now that no-follow has been added to the links in the RSS module does that mean that RSS feeds will become indexable soon?? If so, It would be the Ultimate Evergreen Module!

For a blow by blow of traffic stats etc for the lenses in the competiton, official judge and arbiter Fluffanutta of SquidUtils fame has created an AWESOME comparison chart that compares traffic etc of all the competition lenses and updates daily.

As the month goes on, I’ll update earnings totals on Captain Squid. I’m also looking to update earnings on SquidUtils but fluffanutta and I haven’t figured out the best way to do it yet.

Squidoo Account Earnings Growth

Now, every month payday invariably brings about discussion of Lensrank, that magical formula that helps determine how much your lens makes in a month.

Today, lets focus on one aspect of lensrank that is discussed some, but often not given the weight it deserves : clickouts.

I recently did an experiment and removed RSS feeds from about 40 of my lenses (Squidoo’s analytics do not as of the writing of this article track clickouts from RSS feeds in your stats) and replaced them with eBay modules (which do track clickouts).

the results were immediate and impressive. The clickouts that weren’t previously being captured are now being tracked properly.

And my lensrank SOARED on those lenses and has continued to stay very strong.

The moral of the story? Clickouts can make you more money, lots more.

So, make sure there’s stuff to click on on your lens.

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.

Are you trying to make a living with Squidoo? one of the most effective business models you can pursue is to go around town and build lenses for local businesses.

When done properly, you can have lenses about {Small Town Name} Pizza or Dentist or Tanning Salon shoot straight to the top of the results. That kind of targeting has very real, very HUGE value to small businesses and frankly, they are willing to pay for it once they see the results.

But before you can get there, you have to know how to build local lenses that are going to rank AND convert. And that’s what I’m here to help you do over the next week or so.

Next, Anatomy of a Local Lens

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?

Here’s my general philosophy on researching new squidoo lens topics (or new niches in general)

1. Don’t focus on just ‘one’ keyword to the exclusion of all others - I find this takes a very narrow minded view towards what you want to accomplish and doesn’t really result in the outcomes people are looking for (namely, traffic, attention, conversions, etc)
2. You don’t need monster niches – There are plenty of people that search for specific models, styles, etc that there is no need to target a monster market unless you have a monster budget. For example, instead of going after everyone that wants to buy an appliance, focus on a specific brand of dishwasher.
3. Target Buyers – Unlike most of the people reading this, nearly everyone spends less time on the internet then you. They aren’t up on the latest SEO news or conversion metrics or any of that stuff. They want to find something they are looking for, get good information about it, and buy it. Writing your content to focus on these people will astronomically increase your conversions.
4. What is available? - Although Amazon has pretty much everything for a lot of verticals it is more ‘broad’ then ‘deep’ in some. I’ll often pick new topics based on what advertisers on some of the affiliate networks look interesting or cool instead of what some research tool tells me I should.

I’m in the process of creating some charts to summarize all of the statistics on an ongoing basis. Once this is live I’ll let everyone know so they can catch up on any weeks they missed.

Week 1:

Lenses created: 3

Lenses Receiving Search Traffic: 2

Total Traffic: 181

Squidoo Earnings : $0.00

Aff. Earnings : $0.00

Discussion:

My Laptop got destroyed halfway through last week, which definitely put a damper on new lens creation. However, this weekend I bought a new computer that will allow us to move forward! Significant search traffic is already going to the first two lenses I created, with approximately a 40% clickthrough from search traffic to Amazon or Affiliate links. As traffic increases over time, this should lead to some good sales. In the past it’s usually taken between 30 and 60 days for lenses I make to start seeing significant sales, so I’m not too worried about not having any sales from the squidoo lenses in the first week.

The response from the Squidoo community to the quest has been great so far and I have tons of topics to write about just from the comments I have received. Stay tuned to have more of your questions explained in depth!

Evergreen Module – A squidoo module that can be updated either automatically or by interaction on a lens without entering the workshop. In addition, an evergreen module is indexable by bots/crawlers/spiders even if they can’t read javascript.

What does this mean?

If a squidoo module can provide ‘fresh’ updated contact on your lens that you don’t have to physically add yourself and the search engines can see those changes, I call it evergreen.

Examples -

• Google Blog Search
• RSS mashup
• Amazon Plexo (even if nothing can be added, Yes, changing the order of products counts!)
• Featured Lens module (set to ‘random’ with more than 5 lenses)
• Yelp
• Hometown Stats
• Twitter Search

Any Questions?

First question I want to tackle relates to how long it takes me to build lenses.

From Lewis:

Hey Joe!

Maybe you could also post about how long the lenses take you – I know you make lenses very quickly!

That would also show people just how much is going into the challenge.

Nice idea btw. Good luck with it!

Lewis

And a follow up from David:

good lens! I agree with Lewis I would be interested to see how long it took you to put it together.
thanks

The answer? Including keyword research, each lens probably took me about an hour with actual lens creation time in the workshop at about half of that.

I use a few different principles that allow me to build lenses this quickly:

Practice : I’ve built a lot of lenses in the last few years. Hundreds and hundreds. I know where all the modules are and what they do. Knowing what tools you have and how they work can help you organize your thoughts as you build your lens. Knowing you will need 3 video modules ahead of time and adding them all at once instead of one by one as you go will save you lots and lots of time.

Module Formulas and Templates : (more on this in a later post) Usually I’ll build lenses in groups. The first one or two I’ll play around with modules for a while then once I see which combination is working best, I’ll set up a lens template. The first two lenses I built about dehydrators have similar modules in them but not identical. As I go on building out the niche, I’ll start a template with probably 5-7 modules in it. That will allow me to get my creation time down under half an hour a lens, easy.

Evergreen Modules : I’m a huge fan of Evergreen modules (I’ve talked about them before and will devote some more time to them soon) . They make lens building go super fast and help accomplish a lot of basic content/seo principles that I want to achieve.

Focus : I try to make lenses about fairly specific topics so they are focused and respond to what the searcher/visitor is looking for in a very precise way. If a lens starts to lose focus on me it will often spiral out of control and result in something of a mess that doesn’t get any attention from anyone.

Tools: I use a few basic and free tools to help me do some things faster. I’ll post about these later as well.

Gotta run for now, lenses to build and work to do!