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Chef Keem aka Achim Thiemermann joined us once again for our second “Giant Squid Open Mike” Blog Talk Radio Show on 8/10/09. 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 within the tag pages on Squidoo.com.

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 onsite search 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 AdWords keyword research 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 within Squidoo. Google also looks at your primary tag, so make this one rich in keyword significance.

Put a quotation mark around every word or phrase 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 canonized 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.

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

Whenever you make a comment on a lens, whether it’s a fellow lensmaster’s lens or your own, make it relevant to the lens topic. This helps adding search value to your peer’s page.

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?

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

And the unexpected may reveal itself.

On a similar note...

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• Giant Squid Open Mike Monday – Show Summary 8/17/09 (3)
• Take Giant Squid Open Mike to Bed! (5)
• Spreading my wings outside Squidoo (6)
• Giant Squid Open Mike BTR Show Review 9/21/09 | Home Schoolers On Squidoo (3)