As you are probably well aware, Squidoo Introduced Themes for Lenses, and as I was cruising around enjoying all the variations as people began experimenting, I couldn’t help but notice some of the unexpected “quirks” due to custom HTML people have using to add to the visual impact of their modules. How To Add A Custom ‘Contact Me’ Button To Your Squidoo Lens, which is one of my newest Lenses, had some serious problems before the change (I was a bit lazy not taking care of the problem right away), but it presented me with an opportunity to make a new Lens, Advanced HTML For Borders & Backgrounds On Squidoo.
It seemed like the week went so fast, I had spent a lot of time reworking King Crimson: A Tribute To One Of The Most Influential Progressive Rock Bands by removing almost all of the videos, and using Bonnie’s great Add Music to Your Squidoo Lens to replace them with nifty little music widgets.
I was a little worried at first, because all of the examples of people using this technique on their Lenses, so far, have had music widgets that are set to auto-play, and I really find that annoying, no matter how good the music is. Luckily, I found that there is a setting when making the music play lists that sets the auto-play option on or off – my vision of placing widgets to sample King Crimson’s music throughout the Lens was possible, and that’s exactly what I did.
I didn’t have much luck with the companion Lens, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp because absolutely none of their songs were available. So I found new links to the videos that had stopped working, and added some borders.
I was also able to find time to improve Hotel Bedding Sets | Bedding Featured in Many Hilton® Hotels and Back To School Bedding. These Lenses actually do very well for me, but until now, I’ve ignored my own advice (that I give out to others) about making use of the module titles. I was just learning about placing images in Text modules, and linking to them when I made these Lenses, and I made the mistake of lumping all of the content into just one or two modules.
Sure I was taking advantage of all the character space available in the Text modules, but the result was a very cramped looking Lens. Many people advise against having too much white space on a page, but the opposite is also true. You really need to balance the white space with the content, and not have everything jammed together.
One of the points from Katinka’s SEO for squidoo – getting found in google: search engine optimization that I was missing out on was the part about optimizing my Lenses using the Headings, which in this case was the module titles. Some of the “SEO tricks” I used to get Cash Gifting | Cash Leveraging | Giving Programs | All Are Pyramid Schemes | Scams to the front page of Google for the words “cash gifting scam” simply involved adding certain words to the module titles.
One thing that really upset me before that Lens reached the front page was being outranked by someone’s video where they obviously used keyword stuffing to get ahead of me. Beneath the video was just a long list of the keywords that they wanted to make sure they were optimized for. I was worried people would complain that I was using the same phrases to often, and I was being beat by someone who was clearly just loading in a list of words.
In the end, I passed right by that guy, and I keep bobbing back and forth from first to second page on Google. It may not seem like the most competitive search term to get found by (with about 600k pages returned), but as I loosely watch my competitors, I keep seeing new pages I hadn’t seen before suddenly pop up, then disappear. I believe this is due to sites removing these pages as they get complaints.
Certainly, the original pages that the crew in the Squidoo Chat Room reported for abuse one night, several months ago, have all been removed from Squidoo. That’s what inspired me to do that Lens in the first place!
Back to polishing, looks like I really had a lot on my mind this time, but I need to focus the energy that’s left on getting my Lenses ready for the end of the challenge!