Tag pages are once again indexable by the major search engines. Fluffanutta has an exceptional review of the changes and why the newly indexable tag pages are good so I am not going to re-hash WHY this is good.

Instead, I’d like to draw attention to a series of posts I’ve written in the past about how to take best advantage of tagging your lenses and how you can use it to focus and refocus attention, links, and traffic within your own little corner of the growing universe of Squidoo.

Techniques for Getting your Lens Indexed in the Search Engines -

• Why Links Matter for Indexing – A broad brush overview of what exactly links are and why they are important in getting you noticed on a very basic level.
• Using Proper Tagging to Build Backlinks on Squidoo Lenses – How to conceptually view your lenses’ tags so they can be search friendly and build links at the same time.

Squidoo Tag Theory -

• Visualizing Link Flow on Lenses – Where do the links on lenses go to and where do they come from? This post was written when discovery boxes and Groups were still around. I think the fact that they aren’t around (really) anymore only increases the importance of the remaining factors..
• The Magic of Squidoo Tag Pages - If you read one post on this list this might be the one. It answers the question of why paying attention to your tags matters.
• Why the Discovery Box used to be cool – This is post is not really applicable any more with the current state of the Discovery Box, but I think the principles are worth noting in order to get a better overall view of all the different ways tags are used internally at Squidoo.
• How to dominate a Tag Page – A few examples of how having well crafted tags can help you to become the leader in any topical conversation on Squidoo.. and potentially across the web.

I try to follow a few basic rules of thumb that work quite well for me.

1) add ‘rel=nofollow’ to affiliate links - Especially if they link to some crazy domain or something. Besides, you aren’t trying to build link equity for the manufacturer you are trying to rank for, are you?

2) Links to other authority sites on the topic - Yes, I feel including these in a Do Follow format is actually benificial for several reasons, the main one being it provides a much better user experience. Remember when ‘linkbait’ seemed to mean ‘the top 100 sites for..’ ? The simple fact is that people would rather talk about something that links to a lot of useful resources. Sure you lose some visitors to the other sites, but they are more likely to come back than if your lens is simply a ‘dead end’ with no other information to follow up on.

3) Links to reviews / Forum threads - For the same reasons stated above, these can provide traffic back to you as well as improve user experience.

If you visited a site about your lens topic, would you want access to more information if you were truly interested? Of course.

If that’s what people want, why not give it to them?

First up on this weeks’ Lens of the Week Competition:

Rubiks Cubes as Art by Mosaic -

First off, I was super impressed by the topic choice of this lens, I am a total Rubiks cube nut and this is a truly unique topic for a lens. I’m contemplating trying my hand at some myself if I can find a cheap ‘cube’ supplier around here…

A few technical thoughts that jumped to mind that might help this lens get even more attention (which it definitely deserves!):

Nix the Polaroid Modules – instead of the polaroid modules, use plain text/write modules with classic HTML to insert the image. That way you can link to the original image (or wherever else you want) as well as add search engine friendly ‘alt’ text to the images. I’ve found this is a huge help in getting into google’s image search.

Change up the Lens Title just a bit – I might use a title for the lens like Rubikcubism – Rubiks Cube Art or something instead of the current ‘RubikCubism / Rubikubism – Unique Art’. That way it might all fit on one line and look cleaner as well as having more ’searchable’ terms in the title of the page.

More Descriptive Module Titles – The Photoshop tutorial you give for rubikscubism is fantastic, but the title doesn’t even say that it’s a how-to or tutorial. I think something like ‘Rubikcubism photoshop tutorial’ or something might be more descriptive.

Overall, a great lens!

Next, I want to review a lens from one of the highest quality lensmasters on Squidoo – Spirituality – called Spirituality Quotes.

If any lensmaster knows what they are doing, Spirituality is definitely one of them. The lenses produced by Sprituality are super high quality, pleasing to the eye and usually have fantastic information. I don’t have a huge pile of advice for on page things (except for some minor title optimization which is probably more preference than anything) so I decided to look off-site and see what kind of link profile the lens has.

After running a ‘link:http://www.squidoo.com/spirituality-quotes‘   query in yahoo (this is a very rough gauge of links to a page and in no way reflects what google knows about the site, just yahoo. Still, it’s a place to start.) you can see that there are links to the lens from the following places (that yahoo knows about):

SquidU
Isle of Squid
Spirituality’s blog
this blog
Squidtop
Digital Point
Yahoo Groups

and a few others…

 Not too bad of a start at all! However, there are some other easy links sources that I was able to find in about 3 minutes that might help a lot.

For example, what about adding some of the quotes to WikiQuote and quoting your lens as a reference?

if you do a search for ‘wiki quotes’ and similar phrases you should be able to find a ton of wiki-style resources you can add a few of your quotes to and quote your lens as a reference. Take that and expand on it with lots of different search terms .

okay, There’s a few others that deserve a review as well, I’ll get to them in the next few days. If you want to throw your name in the pot, add it to the Lens of the Week lens plexo. Hint: the more votes you have, the more tempted I am to review it .

I want to expand a little bit more on a few of the ideas that Spirituality threw out there. Here’s a brief excerpt I want to talk about:

I’ve been thinking about this, because squidoo is a place where a lot of the links are dynamic: they stay up only as long as your lens has a high lensrank. Getting your lens into the top 100 for instance is great for several reasons – one of which is that it’s a great link to have. BUT it’s a temporary link if your lens doesn’t actually stay in the top 100.

The links to your lens through squidoo can update on a moment’s notice or they can update daily or over an even longer time period.  Squidoo is built on two or three primary drivers that help build links to individual pages.

The first factor built into Squidoo’s site architecture is Lensrank.  Lensrank controls the appearance of your lens on the top 100 lists, how high your lens appears on tag pages, and to a lesser extent, how often it appears on the ‘Explore Related Lenses’ box.

The second factor to consider with Squidoo’s on-site SEO is tagging. I wrote a huge tutorial on tagging with squidoo for a reason. Tags are directly controlled by the Lensmaster and they directly determine which tag pages your lens can appear on and which lenses your lens will show as a ‘related’ lens for.

The intersection of these two factors is that the order of the lenses that appear on tag pages are governed by Lensrank.

Now, when you have a lens that gets a good chunk of traffic, this can quickly become a self – reinforcing cycle. When your lens climbs the ranks it begins to appear on more tag pages which causes those tag page backlinks to increase in quality significantly, possibly sending you even more traffic.

However, if your lens is just starting out how do you get enough backlinks to catch the eyes of the search engines if you don’t already have the traffic? There are a few simple solutions.

Go after some ‘medium’ tags that only are used by 20-40 other lenses. These tag pages are awesome for lenses that need to get indexed because it’s easy to get on the front tag page for these terms within a day or two (usually).

Go after one or two ‘huge’ tags. The giant tags on squidoo like ‘music’ or ‘business’ can actually be helpful. I’ve noticed that the ‘explore related lenses’ area of lenses don’t always take the top lenses from the tags to display. Sometimes a few of the lenses will be from other lenses that are tagged similarly and have a Lensrank in the same range. This can get you a little more exposure on other lenses plus even the second and third page on some of those big tags can still get you a visit by the search engine.

What do you think of the Squidoo on-site SEO? What tips do you have for getting into the lensrank/tag cycle quickly?

So, with no further blathering, here is The Captain’s Dos and Don’ts with Squidoo SEO.

DO

• Write in clear, concise paragraphs that are easy to read and make sense. Use keywords in your content text.
• Use less than 3 keywords in your URL
• Build multiple lenses around a general theme and link them together with a directory lens.
• Think very carefully about tagging your lens.
• If you have text content in a module, use the subtitle with relevant words in it.
• Know your audience. Who is your lens written to appeal to? Where do they hang out? Find them.
• No-follow your affiliate links.

Don’t…

• RSS modules on Squidoo are rendered with JavaScript. Google does not see any links from an RSS feed in any of your lenses. Don’t believe me? Google one of your lenses and click the ‘cached’ link on the result. Instead, use the google blog search module or one of the other evergreen modules that Does have its contents indexed by G.
• Leaving drive-by links on lenses and blogs just makes you look spammy. Stop it.
• Do your followers on Twitter want to know more about your lens? Match your promotion to your audience, Twitter is full of ‘Digerati’ and is very tech oriented. You may have a bunch of followers that are rabid fans of German Polka Music and in that case you should share your German Polka Lenses with them. Don’t Share every lens you have on Twitter.
• stop looking for places to promote your lens where people will actually care.
• go bombard 25 social networks with the link to your lens. Try one you think is most appropriate first and see how that goes.
• Write huge introduction modules with a short novel and a bunch of pictures. 3-5 sentences in the intro, tops.
• throw a lens up in 20 minutes, come back in 3 months, and state unequivocally that Squidoo sucks and no money can be made using it and there is no value in Squidoo. You look silly.
• copy/paste your article or blog post straight into a lens. Most likely it will just be ignored or the search engines will rank the squidoo lens and demote your blog. Spend some time changing it around.
• think there’s only one definition of success on squidoo.
• links passed from nearly all directories and articles really don’t carry that much weight. Directories and Article (Bum) Marketing require a tremendous amount of energy for  the ROI. Find a better way.

I could go on but I’ve got to go now. I’ll try to expand on this list later.

I think I found a great site today for you guys : Youpet.com

I heard about it from a neighbor, went over and checked it out and it looks like a great place for all you pet lovers (and link lovers ) to spread the word about your pet lenses.

It looks like it’s got a pretty good pile of features with blogs, pictures, a rating system (treats) and other cool stuff.

Unfortunately, I haven’t made a lens about my dog yet (it’s on the list!) so I haven’t had a chance to fully get into it yet.

Those of you that have, check Youpet.com out and let me know what you think!

Now that we’ve established where the links from lenses go to, lets discuss a little bit about how those Squidoo tag pages I crow about so much play into the whole system.

About Tags on Squidoo

The next two diagrams I’m going to show you assume a few things about the tag page. The first is that multiple lenses use that tag (10+). The second is that you use that tag on your lens and that tag is relevant. Having a lens about lemurs and using the ‘marketing’ tag just because lots of lenses use that tag isn’t going to do any good. Unless, of course, your lens is about how to market to lemurs .

Where do Squidoo Tag Pages get their links?

Every lens that uses a tag creates a link back to the front page of the related tag page.

Where do Squidoo Tag Pages Link to?

The First tag page accumulates all the ‘link juice‘ or ‘votes‘ from all the lenses that use that tag. It then distributes these ‘votes‘ among the top ten lenses for that tag as well as to the deeper pages for that tag. For example, the tag ‘Affiliate Marketing‘ has over 2400 lenses that link to the front tag page. That main tag page then distributes all of it’s accumulated link mojo to the 10 lenses on that page as well as the 247 other ‘affiliate marketing’ tag pages. This means there is a ‘trickle down’ effect where those lower tag pages still get some link mojo to distribute to the lenses on each page after the first.

What Happens when you use uncommon tags on Squidoo?

If you use ‘unique tags‘ like ‘best place to buy a new purple rabbit‘ or some such nonsense, you will end up with a lot of tag pages like this one. A single link between the lens and the tag page. Look less exciting? That’s because it definitely is. There are many fewer ‘votes’, fewer paths for the bots to follow to discover your lens, and less exposure overall for your lens.

The lesson in Squidoo Tags:

Pay attention to what kind of tags you are using. If you have a lot of ‘dead end’ tags on your lens, it’s probably affecting your lens negatively.

Next up:

Squidoo Link flow and the Discovery tool OR Why the new Discovery tool Rocks my Socks

Let’s start off by looking at the 4 different ‘types’ of links that go into and out of Squidoo lenses.

Squidoo Link Flow Away from a Lens

As you can see, there are 4 major types of links out of a lens:

1. Tags – These link to tag pages within squidoo. You have complete control over which tag pages, but they will always go to tag pages.
2. Category - There is always a link to the Squidoo Category you chose when setting up your lens. You have control over this.
3. Discover lenses - This is a new addition and links out to other lenses on Squidoo. You have some ways to control these links as well, both directly and indirectly.
4. Modules - Any links you add to your lens in your modules or profile are completely under your control. These are the only links on your lens that lead out from squidoo.

Squidoo Link Flow Towards a Lens

Notice any similarities here? You have the exact same four sources of incoming links to your lens. These could also be called ‘backlinks’, those things everyone wants to have.

1. Tags - All the tag pages that you link to also link back to you in some form. The link to your lens might be on page 27 of ‘music’ though and your link to the tag page is to the first ‘music’ page….
2. Category – The same concept as tags. Your link points to the first page in the category but your link back is not necessarily from the front page.
3. Discover – Your lens will receive some links back to it from other lenses through the discover tool. These are ‘one-way’ links because you are not necessarily linking to the lens that links to you. There are some ways to control these links that could potentially make this very powerful.
4. External – These are the links that set you apart from other lenses. The toughest to get, they can make or break your lens if used correctly. There are a few Squidoo modules that allow you to automatically acquire external links to your lens as well…

Summary

So what does this mean? Squidoo allows you to control the links coming into your lens as well as the links leaving your lens when done correctly. The key is to use the ‘link infrastructure’ that’s in place to achieve your extra piratey goal…

Next up: Using Link flow from Tag and Category Pages to Improve your Rankings

It pulls all the info from the page and you just have to click submit.

Note: Make sure and click on the second tab of the submission window and ‘mark your tag as public’. This makes the link public and indexable by the search engines.

I’ve seen backlinks from Jumptags appear in both Google and Yahoo, so they both index the bookmarks and rather quickly at that.

I haven’t published that trick anywhere else, so it’s worth checking out. PotPieGirl runs a great marketing and SEO blog and talks a lot about actual implementation of theories you hear so much about.

Thanks for the chance to guest post PotPie Girl! If anyone else would like me to guest post, please feel free to contact me. It was a lot of fun and I’d definitely do guest posting again.

-The Captain