From the searches that get people to this blog :

Should I have a seperate blog of each squidoo lens?

Good question. As usual I’m going to give you the quick answer first:

Have a blog for each NICHE you have squidoo lenses (or hubs on hubpages) about.

The problem comes next: how are you going to make sure that blog is getting found by search engines? There are three methods:

1. Interlink all your blogs – and have each point only to the lenses in that niche
   I don’t do this. My niche blogs link ONLY to niche pages, whether lenses, hubs or article pages.
2. Put your free blogs on domains that are so well interlinked within, and already ranking in the serps, that you don’t need to promote your blog. Vox and existing niche nings are examples of this.
3. Make a link wheel for each topic you have lenses about: niche blogs on blogger, vox, wordpress.com etc. Each interlinking, each linking back to your squidoo lenses and other (paying) online properties.

Or of course… Make one blog for all your lenses and promote it in the squidoo network.

Whatever you do: if you are going to make a blog ONLY about squidoo lenses, do NOT host it on blogger or wordpress. They may just ban you for linking out to only one domain. Instead put your blog on one of the squidoo blogging platforms.

The advantages of having several interlinked niche blogs:

• They all get link leverage & google will likely smile on the lenses you link to.
• You tap into the links existing domains have to promote your own stuff.
• You tap into existing AUDIENCE on those hubs. Blogging on Vox for instance means reaching the audience of Vox bloggers in that niche. Audience = people = good

The disadvantages of having several interlinked niche blogs:

• Spreading yourself too thin: You have less chance of developing a longer term relationship with people in a niche if you are not consistent in where your best content is being posted. How will people find you? How can they keep up with the genuine great stuff you keep producing if you are publishing it on several platforms?
• How will you have time to create genuine great stuff if you ARE spreading yourself thin?

These are questions each online marketeer has to figure out for themselves.

Back to the original question:

Should I have a seperate blog of each squidoo lens?

One answer:

If you stick to one niche, you will only need one main blog to accompany it, however many lenses you make.

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Post tags: blogging platform, niche

Misinformation about SEO always ticks me off. It’s usually simply old information being recycled because the people involved don’t keep up with the SEO blogs.

In her latest post, AJ said:

The link back from the Tiger Clipart lens to the Year of the Tiger lens has been changed to “no follow”.

The reason she does that is because these links spoil the ‘wheel’, but she doesn’t want to delete the links, because they’re good for users.

Some history:

When the rel-nofollow attribute came out, it was meant for links that got sold, but SEO’s also started using it to ’sculpt’ pagerank. That is: to give link juice to those pages of their site that they felt were most important, at the expense of pages they did not value as much.

However, in the words of Matt Cutts (THE Google Search spokesperson):

[S]ome crawl/indexing/quality folks noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums).

So last year it was announced by Google that this strategy no longer works.

The new policy means that pagerank evaporates after using rel-nofollow. That is: it does NOT get redistributed to the followed links.

This also means that putting rel-nofollow on any links to your own content, is like throwing drinking water into the sea: it does nobody any good.

So – put your users first: link out to whatever content is relevant for them & make that more important than any link wheel. And please don’t punish yourself by rel-nofollowing links to your own content. AJ – Please?

BTW – I have a mashup of all the important SEO blogs on my SEO Mentor lens.

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Post tags: integrity, rel-nofollow, search engine optimization

Alright: spam alert. This tactic can seriously cross the boundary between creating original content that adds something to the web & content that is only there to make your other content rank.

That said, building links is part of any web publishing business. And looking at the backlinks to Katinka Hesselink the other day, I was stunned at the percentage I had directly created myself. And Katinka Hesselink Net gets some serious traffic. Of course the other links are probably just as important, if not more so.  But if you have to start somewhere…

The reason I am writing this blogpost is that AJ has finally ventured out of squidoo to branch out to other online web properties like hubpages and article sites. This is cause for celebration. Everyone who does that, and links back to squidoo where relevant, is likely to make more on squidoo, or hubpages, than those who limit themselves to just squidoo. Or just Hubpages. Or just that one article site they started on years ago.

She’s doing all this with the idea of a link wheel helping her on. Here’s the simple link wheel:

Honestly I don’t quite get why she’s not putting the squidoo lens at the hub of the wheel. My principles for this sort of thing is simple:

1. Create original content on the site that is most successful for you
2. Create very different content in the same niche, on a site that’s not as successful for you. Link back from there to the first.
3. Create something in the same niche on blogger, wordpress, vox, etc. and link to the first and link to the second, or the third, or the fourth. (am I still making sense?)
4. Vary the order of the wheel per project.
5. Link to your content where you can from niche sites that have their own backlinks

But another way of summing this up is:

• Make sure you don’t publish your stuff at only one place online.
• Make sure you own your best content.
• Interlink all your content.
• Link more to the stuff that makes you money.
• Make sure that everything has at least one backlink.
• Don’t create duplicate content.
• Don’t link out as much from stuff that makes you most.

Your best content should be on places where you are likely to be rewarded for it with either links or money (or both).

You should not put content on sites that are going to steal it or republish it. You should own your own stuff. Mahalo is one site where it’s very possible an editor may step in to change what you’ve done. They lost me that way. There are other examples too.

To close I want to quote Alex who apparently got AJ to that point of branching out:

People start scrambling for $25 here or $15 there. Sure, this can add up to a few hundred dollars a month, if you want to have the time to do that, but you do yourself  or others no good in the process.

…

I will take the $25 a month direct payout and celebrate the hundreds I’ve made indirectly from the publishing sites.

What he’s saying is that the sum is more than the parts. Just be sure the content is real all over.

How I do the link wheel

The main thing to remember is that you want your money making stuff to rank. So that’s where the links have to go. But that doesn’t mean they can’t link out… Here’s what I do (roughly):

Don’t take such drawings too literally. The trick is to make sure everything backlinks that doesn’t rank on its own.

The wheel sites can be anything that is on topic.

Don’t forget to make a new niche blog for any new niche you enter. And don’t list them at your public Blogger account.

Money making sites A, B and C can be anything. From a special squidoo account devoted to a niche, to a hub, to a niche blog you’ve put up on blogger (with affiliate links), to a niche blog you’ve put up that’s self hosted on it’s own domain name. Note that this is still a wheel: the money making sites are not linking out to the articles you put up on sites that do NOT make you anything, like blogspot and wordpress.

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Post tags: link building, promotion, traffic

This blog is made on WordPress, using the Thematic Theme. Thematic comes with 13 widget ready areas (most of which you’ll never use), is coded well for SEO and flexibility of design etc. All that is why I started using it about a year ago, and yet I’m leaving it behind…

Thematic is a Theme Framework. That is: it is designed well enough out of the box for a functional website, but the underlying code is done so well, that you can make almost any design you want out of it – without having to switch themes. Having done that this week I know: switching themes is a lot of work. All the custom work you did for one theme needs to be redone for the next. So why did I put myself through that?

I bought the Thesis Theme yesterday. I bought it because it is fast, it has more built in options and because I have a big web design account these days and really can’t afford to be slouchy on the details. And, of course, Thesis is a theme framework too.

In Thesis you don’t have to code to get rid of links to author pages. In Thesis you don’t have to code to go from one to two to three columns.

To get your own design, you do of course need to code CSS. I spent most of the day yesterday moving over my spiritual blog All Considering to this new theme and recreating the old look.

The result wasn’t exactly the old look, but I got very close & some of the new is an improvement I think. Turns out the underlying HTML coding is granular enough that I could get very close to my old look. Very close indeed. Any differences are choice, not necessity.

What I like: the inbuilt ‘magazine’ look - that’s customizable. I chose the default: two posts out of 10 in full view, the rest only showing snippets. But if you want the real magazine look, you can go with all ten in magazine look. And of course, if you want to change the wordpress settings, you can have as many more as you want.

What I like: not having to create a new page for the home page and yet have the homepage look different from category pages and tag pages.

What I like: not having to install as many plugins. For most uses the All in One SEO Pack is no longer necessary, though I’ve personally put such specific settings in there that I’m still using it. Not that I recommend it: everybody should move on to the new Light SEO plugin. It has the exact same features as the AiOSEO used to have, before they started charging money for ‘extended features’. And yes, this new one can be used in combination with the e-commerce shopping cart for WordPress.

Other plugins I get to uninstall:

• The Google analytics plugin
• Robots Meta plugin

They’re useful for SEO, but their functionality is built into Thesis.

A must have plugin for the lazy coder (or those who don’t know enough PHP to manage) is the Thesis Open Hook plugin. Hooks are great, or so people say. But my PHP was never quite good enough to be able to use them for my custom ideas. I’m getting there, I’ve typed more PHP in the last week than ever before, but still – if I can avoid it, I will. This plugin makes inserting code in unlikely places a breeze.

Thematic has many custom hooks as well: any good WordPress framework does. The difference is in the plugin: no messing with the functions file for simple things like putting adsense at the end of every post.

I’m going to go one step further with Thesis: I’ll be using it on WordPress as a CMS for a site with 700+ pages. This means that having the ability to easily tweak the menu is no luxury – and yes, that’s what Thesis offers. This brings it close to what Joomla has in terms of customizing your menu, without coding. Not quite there, but then I never needed that amount of customization.

So now you know why I ended up paying for a theme in the end… Pagespeed and easy customizations. And remember: pagespeed is no luxury these days. Google is actively rewarding fast sites in the Serps these days.

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Post tags: blogging platform, css, page speed, php, priorities, search engine optimization, Seo, techniques

One of the spooks new online publishers get thrown at them a lot is the reciprocal linking scheme devil. Let’s start with what google says about it:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

I’ve highlighted what I think are the most important bits. But first off: realize that this is a diplomatic text, written to make webmasters behave. It’s not a text that lets you in on the ifs and buts of the case.

This blogpost is in response to Brenda asking me what I thought about reciprocal linking, after I’d told her to start a self hosted blog. She thought that the main reason I wanted her to start a blog was to get links. Well, yes and no. Blogs can make some serious money too. Niche blogs moreover can get a niche audience that no general interest squidoo account can rival with. After all, most people are NOT going to be interested in the same mix of things you’re interested in. They are far more likely to be interested in only one or two of your hobbies. Enter niche blogs and websites, newsletters and even twitter accounts.

Brenda asks great questions. Many of the best posts on this blog were in response to her questions. In this case the reason she asked was because she was worried that if her lenses were linking to her blog, and her blog linking to her lenses, this would get her in trouble with Google. I can see why she thought that, but that’s not what Google is warning against.

First of all, let’s repeat the main message in the quoted text above. It’s the third of the things webmasters should not do according to Google: Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

Of course the main difficulty is in deciding what ‘excessive’ means. Well, Google has a baseline here: what normal people do (who don’t care about Google) is not a problem. So any linking you do to your friends, and any linking they do back to you, is not an issue. It’s part of the ’social graph’ we’re all part of. But mom and pop would never do though is say “Link to me and I’ll link to you.”

Another baseline is hidden here: what is your competition doing? A new site cannot afford to be quite as spammy as an old trusted site, but in a niche where nobody has many natural links, having only a few reciprocal links is not going to look as bad as in a niche with lots of high quality content sites with link profiles to match.

What Google is most interested in is also hinted at in the above text: Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice…

That’s why they count links in the first place: to figure out what content is good.

The next thing to remember about links is that they should be on topic. Or in the words of Google: The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. This is why having unpopular but unique pages is good SEO: those few people interested in that topic have a higher chance of linking to it. These links help your overall link profile.

Your overall link profile

What’s that, your overall link profile? It’s the network your online presence is part of. It’s the sum total of links to your content and the content you link to. It’s important that your overall link profile be trusted by Google. However, not all parts of it have to be equally perfect. Google hints at that when it says you should not link to bad neighborhoods on the web. Of course if you’re trying to sell p*rn or forex trading the bar is not as high as when you’re giving off health advice about something other than a certain male appendage. Bad neighborhood is context dependent.

The main thing to remember about your online profile is that on pages you want to rank, you should NOT be linking out to anything that’s off topic or low quality. But blogs you made purely for the sake of promotion can very well link to similar blogs by other squids. When they link to you, that’s part of your social graph and that reciprocal linking adds strength to the whole network. Especially when not all those links are reciprocal – which is bound to happen as not everybody obsesses over links or is equally willing to link out. Why are such links not an issue? Because each squidblog links out to a different set of squidoo lenses – usually on one or two squidoo accounts, with a few high quality squidoo lenses as exceptions. That is: each squidblog has it’s own fingerprint which is unique and while they’re not very high quality usually, they’re also not usually (the ones in my neighborhood anyhow) spammy either.

Perhaps it’s clear by now why it’s so very important that some of those squidblogs DO link out to lenses not made by that lensmaster. It adds a randomizing factor and rewards quality. Google wants to see us rewarding quality. Rewarding quality is a sign of quality, paradoxically. This is one reason I’m so very glad we have people like growwear around and why she was one of the first I ever interviewed.

What I’m trying to do here, is in words, describe the link graph each one of us is part of. That link graph should show two things: on topic links and popularity. Those generous squids who lensroll anything to everything are helping the people they lensroll to a LOT: it shows their popularity. On the other hand, squids who link out to related lenses they did not make are helping the lenses linked to get ON TOPIC links. These are even better. Especially if the page that contains those links has a decent link profile in return. This is why I have a link plexo for lenses devoted to lenses by other people btw.

To get back to reciprocal links… here’s what you have to look out for. I´ve bolded the ones to do with reciprocal links.

• Make sure reciprocal links are not the ONLY links your site, your account, has.
• Make sure you promote your blog outside squidoo as well as in (I recommend Zimbio) on followed sites
• Make sure you don’t ONLY link out to your own online projects. Where necessary for a quality post, lens or hub, link out to sources that complete that topic.
• DO link to your own content related to your lens – whether a blogpost or a hub. And vice versa. ON TOPIC reciprocal links are part of the game.They’re actually a sign of quality.
  
• DO build your link profile gradually, and in proportion to the growth in content. A new blog will not usually start with hundreds of links to it. Give it 4 or 5 links from prominent on topic lenses to make sure Google knows it exists and build from there.
• Do have a few lenses with link plexos where lensmasters can enter related links. If we all do that, all of our link profiles look better. Especially if we make sure the links in those link plexos really are on topic. An unmonitored link plexo is not a good idea.
• Once your blog is established, do find link plexos where it fits and find blog directories to give it some basic backlinks.
• Niche blogs are great to promote on niche forums and nings.
• Make sure people can subscribe to your blog by email.

Notice only one or two of those involve reciprocal links. The rest is one way. As long as the proportion of reciprocal links within your online profile as a whole isn´t high, you can afford to have a few in there. In fact: reciprocal links are to be expected.

Here’s what I told Brenda: There are those who risk over promoting their content. There are those who risk not promoting their content enough. Only if you’re in the first category should you worry about reciprocal links. If you’re in the second, you should make sure you do get some. Better a few reciprocal links than no links at all. And if you, my reader, are like Brenda, you probably have a few unsolicited editorial links under your belt anyhow. This means you can risk a few reciprocals in the mix.

Don’t mistake: Google WILL figure out the blog and the Squidoo account are related. However, it will only penalize that if it has reason to suspect you’re interlinking more than ‘mom and pop’ would do.  And Google does say: Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors? On topic links are rarely NOT to the best interest of your visitors.

The problem is of course that whatever Google may want for the ideal web, the fact of the matter is that most of us do build links for the Google rankings that come along with them. This is a fact of life that Google can’t publicly acknowledge for political reasons. As long as those links are on topic and of different kinds, there really isn’t much Google can do to distinguish smart marketing from ‘genuine popularity’. And what’s the difference anyhow?

Just like you should not rely on ONLY forum links, or ONLY directory links, you should not rely on ONLY reciprocal links. And you will get furthest if you make content that will attract voluntary links from sources you had not even dreamt of getting a link from. Because that content is just plain good. But if you take Google’s advice to the extreme and wait around for those links without doing anything yourself, you’d better get out of this online publishing business. That is just not going to work either.

In the meantime, tags on Squidoo and Hubpages are a great way to mix things up a bit. That is: to get links that are both on topic and in a different neighborhood from the ones you are otherwise able to get. Why are they in a different neighborhood? Because other online publishers have another online network and link profile. By using the same tags they do, you are linking two link graphs together, making both stronger.

I hope that clarified the reciprocal linking spook a bit. Does it?

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Post tags: hubpages, link building, niche, online promotion, rel-nofollow, tag pages

I’ve recently set up a second squidoo account and in this post I’ll share the advantages and disadvantages.

But why would you want a second squidoo account in the first place? I found that managing 300 lenses in one account became an administrative problem. Even using labels on the dashboard, it was just getting hard to make sure each lens had the proper backlinks, was updated when it needed to be etc. From a user perspective too, a list of 300 lenses on an account page is just not very good. From a search engine perspective 300 lenses about all kinds of topics is not very targeted ‘niche’.

So splitting off an account for my largest niche, calendars, made sense from the perspective of audience, search engines and administration.

For those of you reading this who think they should be making separate accounts for every niche. Do not.

The advantages of being a giant squid are such, that there is no good reason to set up a second squidoo account if you can’t make it reach giant squid too.(...)
Read the rest of Advantages and disadvantages of having several squidoo accounts (1,051 words)

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Post tags: integrity, link building, online promotion, priorities, ratings

If there is one question that is often asked in the squidu forums, it’s this one: How can I get my lens indexed in google? Or, why hasn’t google indexed my lens yet?

I always tell people the same thing: get links to your lens. Start blogging. At the same time I know that with my online profile indexing is rarely an issue. When it comes to indexing new content on old lenses I also don’t complain much. Perhaps because I just take into account that search engines are slow. Perhaps because I generally make sure that my new content gets links.

Anyhow, I recently topped 300 lenses and decided to get myself a second squidoo account. And just to show how slow search engines can be, I’m publishing this post only when it’s indexed by google. Note that the links to the below pages will help this new account, but do not help it get indexed as that has already happened by the time this is published.

Date line:

Dec. 18th – start of new account

By chance there’s a  google cache of my lensography of lensographies on that date and I see I did not link to this account on the 18th itself, though I did link on it somewhere that day or the next.

I also wrote about my new account on squidu that same day.

I started out by transferring my three advent calendar lenses to the new account. I wanted to go slow, because in the Christmas season I did not want to screw up the rankings of my lenses in google. So I went with low traffic, low sales lenses first. Understandably going slow may also slow the speed of Google and the other search engines.(...)
Read the rest of How to get your page / lens / blog indexed in google (647 words)

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Post tags: basics, google seo, indexed, link building, techniques

Christmas is gone and online marketing is getting back to normal. Time to start thinking about some maintenance issues. This is the time to:

• Check your stats
• Look at page speed
• Check your tags
• Delete outdated info and offers

Let’s look at each of those in more detail.(...)
Read the rest of Clean up after the holidays: page speed and more (630 words)

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Post tags: page speed, sales, statistics, tags

I was asked, as part of my new squidoo SEO Mentor role, to make a lens about the statistics of my squidoo lenses. I am, despite my training as a math teacher, not really very faithful in keeping track of stats. I have in the past, but it taught me very little. Traffic is only the result: not something I have any influence on. What I do check regularly is what lenses bring in traffic, what keywords people use to find them and what sells. However, squidoo makes it very easy to keep track of traffic stats for individual lenses, so here are screen-shots of some of my more successful lenses. All of these are, at present, top tier lenses.

I’m showing them not so much to brag, as to show just how irregular statistics are.

First off: what I consider the ideal pattern for traffic to a lens: steady growth. Note that even on this lens, which was based on keyword research, and fit my online profile to a T, traffic didn’t start in the hundreds right away.

Next up: a very similar lens, with very similar keywords. It started off well, but traffic is now going down (note sept. 5th: that’s a statistics glitch):

Another lens with very similar keywords, in a related niche. In this case there was a steady growth, a steep decline with traffic almost back at nothing, then a very steep increase in traffic and now a steady state with lots of traffic. I’m not sure what caused the decline or the increase. I’m not aware of new links to this lens for instance. It’s just one of those google mysteries.

Stumbleupon. I love stumbleupon traffic, I really do, but it can REALLY mess up your graphs. Imagine the peaks to be even higher, you would not even be able to see the traffic in the lens got now anymore. This lens did not get stumbleupon traffic, though it might have  – it fits the profile. Instead the peaks represent forum traffic. Luckily, right now, it gets enough google traffic to stay in top tier. In this case I’m pretty sure that was caused by external links from on niche blogs.

Before I go into my more irregular traffic patterns, I want to share a traffic pattern which I consider to represent a reasonable ‘normal’ for a successful lens. There are clear ups and downs, but this the result isn’t too spiky.

Seasonal traffic. Ideally a seasonal lens gets traffic in heaps during the season, and not so much at other times. Well, sure, except… On the following lens the traffic started dying off BEFORE the season was over. For some reason Google simply decided it was no longer relevant enough for that query. Or perhaps I should say: other pages were judged more relevant, or they had better links, or whatever. This niche has two seasonal peaks: back to school and the holiday season. You can see it’s a rather new lens, which is probably one reason why it wasn’t on google’s list of most important the whole time. This graph does show that new lenses can bring in a lot of traffic.

In roughly the same niche, and made at about the same time, the following lens shows just how much traffic a really trusted site might get off this keyword set. Because my lens was not really all that trusted, it only gets the traffic some of the time. The peaks are when it ranks in the top ten for a shorter keyword, the lows are when it only ranks for longer tail key phrases.While this is as seasonal a niche as the previous one, the traffic doesn’t really show it.

The next one is of a seasonal lens in roughly the same niche with it’s peak right now. This isn’t one with a peak around August, the only peak is leading up to the holidays.

Last but not least – the sorrow of losing traffic. Most of my top tier lenses have had their titles changed at one point or another. In most cases this will not give the lens lasting trouble, at least in my experience. The following lens is the only exception. At least so far. I hope it’s clear from the previous images just how volatile google rankings can be in general. The title change may not have anything to do with the loss of traffic. This is again a seasonal lens with a peak in August and the Holiday season. The peaks do follow that pattern pretty well, except that the second peak is unfortunately much lower.

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Post tags: squidoo seo, traffic

There is conflicting advice out there about the title of a page. On the one hand it’s clear that titles (and title tags) are essential to SEO: they should contain the keywords and keyword phrases users are typing into the search engines. On the other hand, some people have reported pages losing rankings immediately after a title tag having changed.

Personally I’ve changed many a title – and some of my top squidoo lenses have had their title tag changed somewhere along the line. In fact: tweaking titles is something I consider a vital part of SEO. HOWEVER it should not be done lightly. I don’t think I change titles on my lenses more than once a year at best. Mostly my titles stay the same.

The ideal scenario is, I think, as follows:

1. The title one starts out with already contains relevant keywords and keyword phrases, researched with the usual keyword tools or Google.
2. As the lens or blogpost gets traffic, it may become obvious that it is getting traffic for a related keyword phrase. If that traffic is more than for the phrase one would expect there are two options:
   1. Creating a new blogpost, hub or lens devoted to that phrase OR
   2. Tweaking the original blogpost, hub or lens title to be better optimized for that phrase.

I want to repeat: I do this all the time. Tweaking titles is part of ordinary SEO works as far as I’m concerned. I’ve done it with good effect on two of my top ranking lenses on squidoo. I hope that’s enough reason for people to stop fearing changing their titles. But there are other issues here:

First: On low ranking lenses it’s clear that tweaking a title is a risk-less adventure. After all – what have you got to loose?

Second: The title, while important, is not the only factor in ranking. If a title is already reasonably optimized, changing it is not likely to improve things much.

Third: many people write the most awful titles – totally without regard for the types of keywords people are likely to type into google. In that case: by all means change the title. Experiment. Try. Again: what have you got to loose?

Fourth: Google will sometimes simply loose interest in what was previously a high ranking page. This can happen with tweaking, but as easily without tweaking of titles. It’s simply part of the risk of working online. Only proper link building and diversity in ones online portfolio can prevent the damage being serious.

Fifth: titles should only be changed for serious reasons and not too often. It can take months for google to figure out what it ‘feels’ about a new title. Changing your title every week, or month, is foolish. Some people will advise changing titles regularly just to keep google busy with the changes. This too is an extreme I would advise against.

There is, however, one reason that squidoo lenses may be punished beyond the ordinary by a change in title: links within squidoo are often very much dependent on the title. Links on tag pages, featured lenses modules, even the squidutils directory – they’re all dependent on the title. That is: they all change when the title changes. Lots of links changing simultaneously is not likely to be a good sign for google. Especially if those links are the only links that lens has. I feel that the best protection is making sure there are enough links that do NOT change. Within squidoo this can be done through link plexo’s and linklist modules. Outside squidoo the solution is equally obvious: blogging, non-automatic directories etc.

Again though: for a low ranking lens nothing is lost in change. After all – something is apparently not working, or it would not be a low ranking lens.

I hope it’s clear from all this that I DO feel people should tweak their titles occasionally, especially when keyword research or seasonal interests make it likely that increased traffic may follow.

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