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?

Until recently, tag pages consisted of the majority of link flow that could be influenced within squidoo. However, with the recent release of the ‘Discovery Tool’ on lenses (that blue box that has related lenses in it) the possibilities have increased significantly.

The Discovery box on Squidoo displays a subset of other lenses from across Squidoo. Many people have viewed this in a negative light, thinking that this would drive traffic away from their lenses. However, many people are overlooking two major benefits:

1. If you’ve tagged your lenses well it should very easily bring in more traffic than it sends out.
2. You can control all of the lenses in the Discovery box.

What you say? All the lenses? Yep.

You are manually allowed to enter up to three lenses in the Discovery box. Don’t even mess around with that unless it’s for a very specific purpose. Dynamic links can be much more powerful in many instances. Instead, use the Discovery tool algorithm to your advantage.

The Squidoo Discovery Tool Algorithm Deconstructed

From my calculations the discovery tool is based on many things, but a few factors that show through are the following:

• Primary Tags
• # of tags in common
• Category
• Lensrank

I’m not going to reveal which ones I think are the most important, because a Pirate Captain needs to keep a few secrets . But with a little testing you should be able to figure it out yourself.

The Discovery tool truly provides the third leg for controlling squidoo link flow. I hope this little series has been of use to you all and I’d love to hear any questions about it.

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

If you haven’t had a chance to go look at a lens in the last few days, go take a peek. It’ okay… I’ll wait.

…

Okay, so it looks a little bit different. And Squid U certainly noticed. I left my two cents on the update, but I’ll re-cap here.

Personally, I think they are pretty good.

1) I don’t like the ‘Loyalis Recommends’ in my sidebar. If you are going to have a lensroll function, I would prefer that it didn’t look like I was explicitly endorsing lenses that I’ve never seen before. Also, when you use Primary Tag Domination, it results in having your sidebar lensroll and the orange explore box with the exact same links… that’s kinda boring IMHO.

2) umm…. I see the sidebar image issues were fixed in my sleep! Nice work.

As HQ is progressing and working on their layouts and designs, I have been impressed with the way they have handled the criticism, etc. They have been exceptionally patient in explaining their motivations for changes and improvements to Squidoo and this patience is often overlooked.

I think there may be some argument to directing some of the redesign efforts to improved things like tag pages, the workshop (which is becoming a little divorced from the reality of what’s presented), as well as some re-designed ‘central navigation’ areas that make it easy to find some super cool lenses…oh and a pony for Gil..

Great work Guys, keep it up.

Thoughts or comments?

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

Every one of your tags will include your lens on the related tag page. The Primary tag also is included on tag pages but only if it is also a normal tag. (I know, confusing and weird. Just repeat your Primary Tag once in the main tags, it will save you lots of heartache).

Without getting too terribly deep into linking and link quality and link density and all those other SEO terms, this is why tagging is important:

Tags allow you to use them as your ‘lensroll’ so to speak while allowing you to keep your lensroll open for whatever Squidoo fills it with.

Oh yea, one more thing. Lensroll slots are filled by searching for lenses with the same Primary Tags.

�Here’s an example:

First page of Tag Results for Tom Petty:

Ok, you can see that I have 8 of the top 10 lenses with the tag Tom Petty (Well…more like 16 of the top 20 ). Now, what does this do for my lensrolls on my lenses? Creates dynamic, topical, useful and relevant links… to more of my content.

Here’s the lensroll from a random Tom Petty lens of mine. I did not manually choose the lensroll (that would take away my evergreen content!). Instead I just let Squidoo pick what to fill the lensroll and the lens footer slots with.

Guess how many of those 7 lenses are mine?

Yep, all of them.

And because of the lensrolls (among other things) they have as much dynamic content as possible to keep the big G interested.

I expect there may be some questions about this so feel free to drop a line or stop by the Squidoo chat room after 6pm CST or so and I should be around.

Fluffanutta has written an exceptional article on Primary Tagging as a forum post. I’m going to repost it here after offering a few of my thoughts on Primary Tagging.

1) If your lens is about polka dotted teddy bears, I would just use ‘Teddy Bears’ as my Primary Tag. (as an example)

2) Primary Tags are going to be a careful balance between choosing a tag that has more than one or two lenses under it, but not choosing some of the most general tags on Squidoo (i.e. Marketing and Music should not be your primary tags)

3) Primary tagging has an effect on search results withing squidoo as well as on ‘tags’ pages. You can look at tags pages by either clicking on the ‘More Lenses About Primary Tag‘ link on the lens or by going to the Tag Cloud.

�Fluffanutta’s Initial Post: (Reminder: Check the Forum Post, the Follow-up Tips have been excellent also)

The Primary Tag is the first tag you get to define when creating your new lens, and it is an often misunderstood and very under utilised by many Lensmasters. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem do a whole lot, but there are some important points to note:

- In some lens formats (e.g. Ever.com and SquidWho) the primary tag appears at the very top of the page, next to “Explore more:”.

- Most lenses (maxxed) have a box in the side bar titles “Explore more…”, containing links to the Category and Primary Tag of the lens, plus all the groups it belongs too.

- Another feature of the sidebar (which is not always present) is the tag list, which is usually headed by the Primary Tag (on un-maxxed lenses), and then the first 5 regular tags (in alphabetical order). The remaining tags are hidden, and search engines may ignore these ones.

- Every appearance of the Primary Tag on your lens adds weight to that key phrase on your lens.

In addition, I am working on a new project that will make these Primary Tags even more important! So, you need to make sure that your these tags are as optimal as possible.

Here are some tips:

1. Your Primary Tag wants to be the most important key phrase that you can think of. For example, if your lens is about a person or a product, stick to just their name.

2. Keep your tag to just 2 or 3 words, where possible. One word is not always specific enough (unless the subject is a strong brand like Pepsi), and more than 3 words can sometimes be too specific. Of course, it does depend on your subject matter.

3. Don’t simply repeat your Lens title again (even though this is the default when building a lens). Your title should include as many keywords as you can sensibly fit (no keyword stuffing!), while your Primary Tag is about your key phrase.

4. Format your Primary Tag nicely – keep it Capitalised, spelt correctly (!) and don’t include any special characters or quotes (“). Use spaces between words, not dashes or underscores.

5. Make sure you repeat your Primary Tag as a regular tag too. The tags appear as the Meta Keywords at the top of the page, and you don’t want your key phrase to be missing from it.

6. Pick a Primary Tag which is popular, i.e. people will be likely to be searching for it and other lenses are might also have the same Primary Tag.

Here are some examples: Doctor Who :: Discworld :: Digital Camera Accessories :: Smart Phones

Bad examples: The Whole Lens Title Again :: Kee Frase Spelt Wong :: lowercasewithnospaces :: “Phrase in Quotes”

I hope that people remember these tips – I need to go and change a lot of my own Primary Tags having just looked at a few of them. And remember – I’m developing a project that’ll bring these tags in to their own…