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.

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

After you begin to see search traffic from your lens, the keywords used to find it will be displayed on your Traffic tab of your Stats area. This is all well and good, but what if you are totally missing a keyword that could bring you even more traffic?

That’s where a Keyword Optimizer comes in. This handy little script takes your lens URL and spits out the most commonly searched phrases based on your content. Have a look, are there keywords that are searched often that are relevant to your lens? Are you using them? I’ve noticed improvements from switching two word keywords around (‘black hat ‘ to ‘hat black’ for example) as well as some keywords I just totally missed.

Try out the Keyword Suggestion tool and let me know what you think.

-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

The first addition to this new section of the Captain is a keyword Analyzer. Simply put in your lens URL (without the http://) and it will return a list of keywords pulled from your lens.

Tip: Make sure that any keywords highlighted in yellow are also in your Tags.

Tip: Take your top 3 or 4 keywords and combine them into multi-word phrases in order to attack that long-tail you hear about.

Example:

When I entered my Pirate Costume Lens into the generator, I received the following keywords:

So, in order to come up with quality tags, I then combined these keywords into multiple word ‘long tail’ tags like so:

girl pirate costume
female pirates costume
lady pirate costumes

etc. etc.

When google checks your page, it reads the tags first (not assigning any special weight to tags that I can see) and then reads your content. I’ve found that the closer the two match, the more long-tail terms I get hits for.

- The Captain