Squidlog.net

Well I just participated in another great Blog Talk Radio session conducted by Joan Adams, Kate Loving Shenk and Chef Keem.  The focus of this session (10 August) was very much on keywords for Squidoo lenses.

One of the topics I raised, via the simultaneous text discussion, is the fact that Google deep indexes Squidoo lenses (i.e., Google Bots look right through your lens and the comments to index your lens for search term purposes).

I first wrote about this in an article some time ago when I noted that SEO experts were turning cartwheels to get Google to deep index their websites.  I pointed out  that Google automatically deep indexes Squidoo lenses.

I have just done a test to check this deep indexing out again.  Here I have used my Squidoo lens on Digital Storytelling as an example.  I did a search on the term- digital storytelling primary school (no quotations marks) – and my lens came up as No 5 in Google search engine results (out of 2,510,000 results).

The descriptor shown for my lens in the Google results is not my Lens Description nor an excerpt from my Introduction Module, but rather a collection of relevant terms from various parts of my lens – the tags,  the table of contents, a module heading and descriptions of links within a links module:

“Primary school digital stories: Digital stories by primary school children. ….. Primary School Photo Stories. These digital stories are drawn from Focus …”

You can check out how Google has indexed the lens in relation to the entered keyword search term by clicking on the “cached” button below the search term results for my lens.  From this you can see that Google is highlighting words like “stories”, “school”, “digital stories”, “primary school”, etc. as being relevant to the search term.

An interesting observation is that while “primary school digital stories” and “primary school photo stories” are listed in my tags, the searched keyword term – digital storytelling primary school – is not in my Squidoo lens tags…and my lens still ends up on the first page of Google results!

So Google indexes the whole of your lens and is looking for content (words and phrases) that relate to the searched keyword term.   Google does this “in context” – so it’s still guided by your primary keyword and lens description to test relevance.  So irrelevant keyword stuffing will not work.

So I’ll let a true SEO expert, Aaron Wall, enlighten us on this process of Google’s indexing of word and phrase relationships in the context of your lens:

• search engines such as Google do try to figure out phrase relationships when processing queries, improving the rankings of pages with related phrases even if those pages are not focused on the target term
• pages that are too focused on one phrase tend to rank worse than one would expect (sometimes even being filtered out for what some SEOs call being over-optimized)
  
• pages that are focused on a wider net of related keywords tend to have more stable rankings for the core keyword and rank for a wider net of keywords

I could not say this better myself…and I read it three times to try to appreciate the deep meaning and insight in these comments.

A simplistic translation for the Google ranking of Squidoo lenses might read like this:

What will work is to use a variety of terms related to your primary keyword and do so throughout your entire lens…but whatever you do, relevance to the lens focus is of utmost importance.

BTW – I would strongly encourage the reader to participate in the The GiantSquid OpenMike Radio Show.  Here Giant Squids and other Lensmasters freely share their insider information and experience and we all learn together in the Squidoo spirit of collaborative marketing.

Image credit: Digital Storytelling by sridgway on Flickr

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