Squidoo Giant Squid Talk Radio

Chef Keem aka Achim Thiemermann joined us once again for our second show: Giant Squid Open Mike. The chat room was active with interesting sidelines going on. You'd think that keywords, tags and Google searches were the most stimulating topic in the Universe!

We differentiated between Google searches and the searches that take place in the Squidoo community.

You can find out how people find your lens by looking under the stats section of your Squidoo platform. Click on the traffic tab. This will tell you how your readers are finding you thus far. By focusing and fine tuning your keywords, your lens traffic will increase.

Now Squidoo allows all tags and keywords to be picked up by Google, whereas at one time, keywords and tags were accessed by Squidoo members only. This is a great change.

Now your lens may be exceedingly popular by Google and not so much by Squidoo. If you are selling items on your lens, you will want Google traffic, and lots of it.

The idea is to tweak a keyword or two and allow the results of that tweak take two weeks to materialize. Then go back and tweak some more, if needed.

Add key words in your module titles and to your content. Use the Google ad word keyword search tool to refine your idea.

When you are making your lens, you will notice green, red, and yellow tag boxes. If green, this means that other Squidoo lensmasters are using this tag. If red, this word or phrase is not as strong in Google. Google also looks at your primary tag, so make this one rich in keyword meaning.

Google Ad Word Tool

Put a quotation mark around every word you are searching for. Take a look at all the keywords for your topic and fit your copy to match keyword relevance. Don't just throw around a few keywords which have nothing to do with the message you are trying to convey.

My experience with all of this used to be: ignore keywords. They stifle creativity, I told myself. They are entirely too left brain for me to even consider.

So I went to the Daily Digest tab on my dashboard page, and took a look at the lens most in need of updating.

The lens was called "Ghost Nurses." So I can't change the url at this point, but I added keywords, like haunted hospitals, and ghost stories, all of which rank high in google searches.

Then I had a lens called One Person Revolution, which mentions a family friend and American Folk Hero, Ammon Hennacy, friend to Dorothy Day, who is a Roman Catholic Saint who just hasn't been canalized yet.

Ammon Hennacy called himself a Roman Catholic Anarchist who walked across this country for peace. He spent years in jail because he refused to pay the war tax.

In my keyword search experiment, I found a documentary about Ammon which is absolutely stunning. I found beautiful pictures of Ammon, which were so much more appropriate than what I originally had.

I changed the module titles and changed the copy a little bit to mirror my keyword discovery.

What I realized is this: That this keyword game is a right brain activity, wholly creative and expansive.

Whenver you make a comment on a lens, whether a fellow lensmaster, or your own, make it relevant to the lens topic.

Keep in mind the "search robots," and write partially for that, too. If you are writing about chocolate, and call it sinful, some sort of religious connotation will be made about the word "sinful," and before you know it, your lens will be placed in another category you had never intended for it.

Like going to hell, for instance.

Mention your main keyword in the first two lines of the Intro, and put the word in bold.

Look and see where your lens is ranked and put yourself in the searchers shoes. Who are you writing too? Who is your audience?

You can type your entire URL in the Google search bar, and see what this yields, as well.

As you work with this, more possibilities arise. My main discovery is that this is a right brain activity. It is fun.

And the unexpected may reveal itself.