Squidoo is In the Pink!

Welcome to Valentine's Day on Squidoo!  Yep, no time like the first week of January to get started on those Valentine's lenses!  (Here's one of mine.)

Have Valentine pages to update?  When you do, consider adding them to the Gift Guide category and choosing a Valentine's Day topic.  That choice will give you the gorgeous pink and red Celebrate theme, just released for Valentine's Day.  I love seeing Squidoo in the pink!

Unsure about joining Celebrate magazine?  Would 3.7 million pageviews over Christmas sway you?  It's up to you, but there are advantages to including your lenses in the magazine.  When you do, make sure you've updated each Valentine's lens with a great, square intro photo as well as a nice, big picture in the body of the lens to give it a better chance of being featured on Celebrate's front page.

What's your favorite Valentine's Day lens?  Feel free to share it in a comment below or on Susan52 on Squidoo's Facebook page. 

XOXOXO, everyone!

Squidoo Lens Reorganization Project for the New Year

If you've been thinking that you need to get more organized in the new year, you're in luck when it comes to organizing your Squidoo lenses.

This SquidBlog post is a heads up on the new, three-level categorizing system coming soon to a Squidoo near you.  I think everyone will be thrilled to know that we will soon be able to categorize, sub-categorize, and sub-subcategorize each of our lenses.  (Well, not everyone.  Sometimes change doesn't come easily to Squidoo lensmasters, but I digress.)  Clearly, having a new, more specific way to assign topics to our lenses should be a good change.

Once the system is live, lenses will be re-ranked within the new topic areas.  Seems to me this should allow more lenses to rank higher on more top 100 lists, but we shall see.  Before the new topic ranking is published, Squidoo will allow a week or two for lensmasters to go through our lenses and find a proper topical home for each one using a bulk topic recategorizer tool.

I love the timing of this release in that it coincides with the natural inclination many of us seem to have this time of year to tidy up and organize our belongings, including our pages on Squidoo.  Begin thinking of how you'd like to group your lenses and watch for further announcements of the new topics.  This is one change I'm really looking forward to.

How about you?  Does re-categorization of your lenses sound like a positive move?  I'd love to read your thoughts in a comment below.

The Importance of Categories on Squidoo

If you're already a lensmaster on Squidoo, you may not visit the Squidoo.com page very often. If you haven't seen it lately, go take a look. Currently gracing the gateway to Squidoo is a collection of lists of the top five lenses in each of 27 categories. Each of those lists also has a "more" button which, when clicked, leads the visitor to the list of the top 100 lenses in that category.

Why is this important to you? Simply because thousands of visitors each day enter Squidoo through that Squidoo.com page and most of them choose to click either a lens name that catches their eye or they choose to further explore a category of interest to them. If you have a lens that ranks high in any of those 27 categories, there is a much greater chance that a visitor to Squidoo.com is going to find your lens.

Note that there are actually 32 categories in which to place your lenses. If you have a lens in a category that isn't listed, the odds of someone finding that lens through Squidoo's front door is drastically reduced.

Before you make a change to your category choices, though, consider other factors. If a lens's traffic is already good, recategorizing it might prove to be a mistake. Also, some categories contain a lot more lenses than others, thus making it more difficult to land a spot in the top 100, let alone the top five. Of course if you do change the category on a lens and placement when lensrank updates next time proves to be poor, you can always change it back.

Switching categories on Squidoo is just one way to fine tune a lens, but it's a good option to consider. Just keep in mind the old idiom: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.