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?

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.

The Most Visited Blog Posts on Captain Squid in 2008

Can Squidoo Make you $500 in one day? Yep. - This was a post to mark the first time that I ever earned $500 in one day with Squidoo. My Holiday season hasn’t been quite as juicy since then, but that was somewhat expected with the current content mix of my lens portfolio.

The Single Biggest Tip I Can Give Squidoo Lensmasters – This tip is a bit more motivational and attitude related than any specific thing you can do as a process to succeed on Squidoo. However, you guys obviously liked it as this was the second most visited post of the year. I’ll have to write more posts like these in 2009.

One Lens, One Month, $1,000 – This is another earnings milestone post, marking the first time that I earned $1,000 from a single lens in one month. To date, I’ve had 2 different lenses earn that much in a month so it can in fact be done and is not an isolated incident.

Making Money with Pepperjam – This popular squidoo affiliate marketing post gives a step by step guide on creating a lens to promote a Pepperjam Network affiliate product. Don’t miss the second part of the series where we talk about adding products to a lens from a Pepperjam Advertiser.

Don’t Listen to Bunk SEO Advice – Perhaps one of my personal favorites, I rail against the dumb labor intensive SEO that doesn’t really produce good results and try to shine a little light on some of the facts around employing good SEO practices in order to get the most bang for your buck with your time. When you have a couple hundred lenses, time becomes quite valuable and wasting it on things that don’t work is simply silly.

The Captain’s Personal Favorite Squidoo Posts of 2008

Here are a few  Squidoo nuggets that I think flew under the radar but have some valuable information that is worth reading.

A Guide to Squidoo Income – A lengthy post detailing the nuances of Squidoo’s income sharing structure and when payment takes place for various types of earnings. I hear this question so often that I had to put something out there I could refer people to.

8 Must Have Firefox Plugins for Squidoo – Get these if you haven’t already. I still use every one on that list constantly. I may expand this to 10 plugins next year sometime but these 8 are enough to really reduce wasted time when you are building lenses.

Using Tags on Squidoo – This was a three part series I wrote in April and May. Since Squidoo changes so fast, a few small points may be out of date here and there but I’m still a firm believer in using this strategy to increase lens visibility. Start with an overview of link flow, then learn a little more about how Squidoo tag pages (used to) work and how they still do before finishing up with learning how to leverage the ‘Discovery’ or ‘Explore More’ box on lenses.

Those are the 10 best blog posts from Captain Squid this year according to you the reader and how I was feeling about my personal favorites this morning.

Anyone else have any favorites I missed?

Since neither of these phrases really provide any practical use to users, let’s try to move beyond it a bit and actually define what we mean when we talk about ‘content’.

How I define ‘web content’

Web content is a collection of data presented in a browser that has been modified in a unique way by the creator of that data.

Using a squidoo lens as an example, I usually term the following as ‘content’:

• Module order
• Module title
• Module subtitles
• text input by the lens creator
• text readable by visiting web crawlers and spiders that was filtered by the lensmaster
• pictures
• picture alt text
• keywords
• Page (lens) title
• external links
• internal links
• HTML formatting

Note: I don’t consider my profile to be a part of my definition of ‘unique’ or ‘kingly’ content because I run the same profile on every lens. If you modified your profile differently for each lens I may be convinced to include it in this list although it would probably just fall under ‘text input by lens creator’.

Now that we have defined content in a general way, you can begin to look at your lenses in the context of ‘unique’.

Do you have default module titles or ordering?

If you are aggregating content is it filtered or presented in a unique or at least interesting way?

The name of the game for both you and Google is to add value. Regurgitating something you already had elsewhere doesn’t add any ‘value’ to anything.

Conversely, providing an excerpt and or link to other valuable resources by framing them within the context of your lens can definitely provide value.

You don’t solve any problems or create any new questions by simply copying something else. You need disparity, corollary, contrasting, comparison or some other kind of value you provide that makes it unique to you and to google.

Digg doesn’t write articles. It aggregates them in a unique and interesting way. Are they still creating something unique and useful? You bet.

While content certainly can be defined as just the words on the page and unique can be defined as ‘not exactly the same because i moved some words around’ there is a deeper meaning to content that if you try and explore I think you will be surprised at how easy it is to add value to a visitor’s experience when they visit your lens.

Got that?

Okay, now that you’ve created something that actually has value to it, is it useful for me to recommend to a friend as a resource? You can do quite well by creating lenses with a minimum standard of value that incrementally helps your visitor along their path. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it and probably all but a couple hundred lenses fall into this category.

However, there is also something to be said for a lens that provides such enormous value that your visitors have to bookmark it because they will never find anything about that topic as useful again. A lens with enormous value does not have to be enormous in size or scope, but in utility. Figuring out how to make these types of lenses quickly and effectively will probably be the biggest development in lensbuilding in 2009.

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?

Hi Captain,

What exactly is “No-follow your affiliate links”? Can I do that with my Amazon links for instance? Thanks for your great posts. Really worth reading.

No-Follow Links:

Adding ‘no follow’ to a link effectively tells the search engine spiders to stay away from that link and don’t give any ‘credit’ to the destination of that link. Google has announced on separate occasions that their preference is to have links that could be considered paid endorsements as no-follow. With affiliate links it is painfully obvious that the links are an endorsement of some kind because they usually go to nonsense domains with lots of consonants strung together. There’s no since in giving that domain a bunch of link juice!

This is the main reason that the links in the ‘money making’ modules (ebay, amazon, cafepress, etc) are ‘nofollow’.

Does it really make a difference?

A few months ago, I replaced the vast majority of my affiliate links on lenses to include ‘nofollow’. Since then, I’ve noticed an increase in traffic. whether this has to do with tagging the links correctly or from other factors it’s difficult to say.

I’m pretty certain that at the very least it doesn’t HURT anything.

How to add Nofollow:

regular links will look something like this:

< a href=”http://squidtop.com”>Squidtop – Blogging for Lensmasters</a>

to add nofollow, simply add ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ after the quotes around the URL like this:

< a href=”http://squidtop.com” rel=”nofollow”>Squidtop – Blogging for Lensmasters</a>

Try it out and let me know if it helps your lenses!

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.

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.

Net earnings (after advertising, hosting, and other costs) for April Came out to:

$2,384.81

Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

Back in January, I announced that one of my goals was to make $10,000 with Squidoo in 2008. At the end of April I am hovering right around $4,000 for the year, which puts me ahead of schedule.

A few more months like April and I will really be in good shape!

In other news, look for the last half of the Squidoo SEO lessons on Tagging to cross the blog this weekend sometime.

I’m also beginning to put together an about/services page for Captain Squid, which it sorely needs. Is there any information or services that you folks would like me to add in particular?

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