If you can’t figure out why you can’t get any search traffic from google on your lens go to the SquidUtils lens Search (powered by Google) and put in the keyword you are trying to rank for. The search only searches lenses (or groups) on squidoo instead of the entire web.

If you aren’t #1 or #2 on squidoo for a keyword how likely do you think you are to be chosen by google to represent that keyword from squidoo to all the other sites on the web?

all hope is not lost and you can certainly climb the ranks within squidoo quite quickly with some good content and attention. Just keep in mind that if you are getting ready to build a lens about ‘The Secret’ … don’t. It’s been done, I promise.

Get a new spin on things, there’s huge amounts of traffic out there to snag, I promise.

I stumbled across this while I was playing with google docs a few weeks ago and have been meaning to share it with you all.

Here’s the short and dirty tutorial on inserting a graph on your lens:

1. Create a google docs spreadsheet or upload an existing spreadsheet to google docs. By creating or uploading a spreadsheet with the data you want to graph you are able to create a graph through google’s graphing features.
2. Create a graph or chart by clicking on the graphing icon in the the google docs toolbar. (Don’t know how to do that? Here’s an instructional video.)
3. In the top right hand corner of your brand new chart is a menu titled, appropriately enough, ‘Chart’. Click it and select ‘Publish Chart’.
4. Copy and paste the HTML code that is given to you into your lens, Presto! You have a chart in your lens.

Why this is cool

The chart is dynamic, meaning if you change the data in your spreadsheet the chart will automatically change on your lens.

Charts are great for helping to illustrate large amounts of data or relative importance of different items. They can really add a nice multimedia flavor to a lens. Careful you don’t overdo it though, one is probably plenty for all but the most technically oriented lenses.

Here is an example of a squidoo lens with a google chart embedded in it.

The ‘expert’ content creation space is definitely hitting the big time with google entering the market, but does Squidoo need to be worried besides watching what Google does? I don’t think so and here’s why:

Marketers vs. Academics –

As I browsed around the Knol site to get a feel for it, I came away with a very dry and almost sterile impression. I think Google’s definition of ‘expert’ is going to vary signficantly from Squidoo’s. By expert, I think Google is hoping to see academics and scientists writing position papers, similar to a peer review. This makes sense as Google is founded and run by very smart academic minded people so clearly the site is going to reflect those influences.

Conversely, Squidoo follows the mantra that everyone is an expert and everyone deserves a shot to talk about themselves, their business, their ideas and their opinions. While this can lead to a slightly less serious tone than what knol appears to be targeting, I think the result is that Squidoo is much less intimidating to build a page on.

Marketers 1, Academics 0

The Media Experience -

Squidoo allows you to add all kinds of feeds, videos, products, examples, data, charts, and other rich multimedia to help prove your case.

Knol doesn’t.

Community -

While many people are avid users of Google’s search engine as well as their Gmail platform, Google is still going to have to create a core group of die-hard early adopters to make the site work. This is harder to do than it looks but Google has done it in the past. If Google can in fact get a community together, their ability to scale may create a monster.

Right now, the money’s probably not good enough (Adsense only) for authors to leave Wikipedia or Squidoo for it (Yes, even though Wikipedia is free it still has massive mindshare and offers some power to its power users).

Customer Service -

It will be interesting to see if Google can provide the levels of service that the 6 people at Squidoo and the 15? or so at Wikipedia can with their gigantic workforce of thousands.. I doubt they can.

Inertia –

Google Knol still has to get through the Dip in order to really come out as a major player in this space. The more users that other ‘expert’ sites pick up, the harder this will be.

Summary –

Squidoo isn’t going anywhere. I do see Knol eventually filling a niche as something of an online peer review forum for academics and scientists which I think is actually sorely needed in that area. If Google really wanted to challenge Wikipedia and/or Squidoo for direct users, they would have allowed you to add a ton more media, integrated their social networks, and generally thrown a lot more resources at it.

What do you think? Fired Calamari or Squid Supreme?

Along those lines, you can also use tags on your squidoo lens to create some very awesome backlinks. I’ve recently done an about face on how I use tagging on Squidoo and have noticed some great results.

Since each tag has it’s own page on Squidoo, you are creating an instant backlink to your lens each time you create a tag. Similarly, every time you change a tag, your link goes from one tag page to another…

Here’s the trick,

You want your lens to show up on highly relevant tags that that have multiple lenses pointing to them. You also want to be on the very first page if there are more than one page of results for that tag.

Example:

For a lens about polar bears I might have used to use the following tags:

• Polar Bear christmas card designs
• arctic polar bear habitats
• Polar Bear clothes and shirts
• Polar Bear Pictures and videos

etc.

But now I’ll set my tags to look more like this:

• Polar Bear
• animals
• arctic bears
• iceberg

etc.

Tags that are highly relevant and have multiple lenses linking to them will get you indexed faster and ranked higher.

By doing this, and practicing Primary Tag domination, you build up a nucleus of high ranking mini-sites that connect to each other in loads of different ways.

And that’s a good thing

This is a pretty in depth topic, so I might take a few posts to cover it fully. For now, we’ll call this part 1 and discuss links.

Links
Links are obviously important for getting noticed by both real people and the search engines. Of course, Google has made billions of dollars by turning linking into a science as well as an art form. Squidoo can be very powerful for generating internal links (links to other squidoo pages) and is optimized very well for ‘on-page’ SEO elements. Here are some ideas to tip the scales in your favor even more.

Link Freshness- If your lens has some new links pointing at it every few days or weeks, it gives google a new ‘path’ to find your lens by. There are some automatic tools I use like Zimbio to accomplish this on a basic level, but there is always more that can be done.
Link volume – The more links you have, the more likely Google is to find one, follow it to your page, and index it. This can backfire if you just spam your link to poor directories and other ’shady’ neighborhoods. Sites with a good internal linking structure (Lensroll.com is a great example of good linking structure) can actually provide you with multiple links to your lens through various categories, user pages, etc.
Link Quality / Power A few really great links are all you really need to get indexed and start climbing the results. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. This is where creativity can really help you out. Do you know the market leader in your niche? What sites are people that view your lens also going to? Do you have a link plexo or link list that points to relevant sites? If those sites have any kind of social interaction (blogs, forums, etc.) then it’s an easy step to join in there conversation and contribute some valuable content to them (as comments and posts) with a link back to your lens. Again, providing something valuable is critical here, as spammy actions could wreck your reputation with those sites, as well as google. A relevant link with relevant anchor text is well worth the work and will reward you with organic traffic from the link as well as improved results in google. As Seth is fond of saying, Make it Remarkable and they will come

That should provide a good foundation for you to begin to build your outside links. In the next part, I’ll show you some ways that I use different options available on your lens to build more links and more importantly, more powerful links from within squidoo.

Please feel free to ask any questions about this in the comments.

However, there are some common lensbuilding and squidoo techniques that many people use that are just plain wrong. So, I thought that I’d debunk a few of those for you piratey squids this morning.

1. Squidoo RSS Feeds show google new information everytime someone visits - False -� the RSS feed is run on Javascript (AJAX), not php. Technospeak aside, this means that google can see your module title, description, and subtitle of RSS feeds. However, there are some Squidoo modules that will show different content to google every visit.
2. Excessive keyword tagging can hurt – Sometimes - I always recommend starting a lens with 8-15 keywords and then adding long tail terms as they are discovered. This is more about relevancy than number. I’ve got a lens with the full 40 keywords being used that is getting over 1k hits a week. I’ve got others where I’ve gone back and found I did a terrible job tagging them and only have a few tags that could be more relevant. worry about good relevant tags, not about having ‘too many good tags’.
3. You can’t make any money with Squidoo - If you believe this one you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog.. and whatever you do, don’t look here.
4. Google has Slapped Squidoo – Ahh the infamous ‘Google Slap’. Yes, a penalty was applied to Squidoo pages last July. Squidoo and Seth immediately set about beating up on some spam that had snuck into the system. They addressed the problem and traffic has been on the rise ever since August. Google is constantly changing its algorithm to rank on many different factors. I have some lenses that do great with google and some that don’t. Google is going to show what they think the most relevant search results are at the top of the pages. So, provide relevant content to your topic and Google will find your lens.
5. Gil’s Pony is the Secret to Lensrank - Actually, This one may be true…

-The Captain

EVERY time you fill out a module, make sure and fill out the second heading line with another keyword-rich sentence. This is important for 2 reasons:

1) the subtitles are in what are called ‘header tags’. H1 tags are the REALLY BIG titles you see at the top of the lens.� H2 titles are the module titles. H3 titles are the subtitles. Google and other search engines weigh keywords in header tags more heavily than in content text. This means you are missing out on potential google goodness every time you leave a subtitle blank.

2) It makes the lens look more ‘put together’ and gives an impression that you spent some time on it to make it look good. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion (unverified) that subtitles may play a very minor role in LensRank calculation.

So, the next time you build a lens, remember those subtitles!

-The Captain