It has to be said that my knowledge of SEO is pretty limited and the lenses that I have created after searching for what I thought were good keywords have met with limited success.

What has been far more successful for me, however, is to go to forums on subjects that I am interested in and could make lenses on and see what questions are being asked time after time.

I did this a few months ago and created this lens – 10 Things You Should Avoid Doing in Thailand – which has been in the top 10000 squidoo rankings from a few days after creating it. It answers many of the questions that were being consistently asked on a travel forum.

Needless to say I will be using this tactic again in the future.

I recently had a squidoo lens which had consistently been in the top 10000 for ages suddenly drop down to about 30000. I hadn’t made any real changes to it so I was a bit unsure what had happened. When I took a look at it I noticed that most of the links on it were broken!!!!

So What?

Well, this particular lens basically consists of a set of links. Without them it is a bit redundant. The lesn gives a list of links to suppliers of Envelope Reuse Sticky Labels and I am happy to report that all links are (were as of yesterday) fully functional.

When I looked further at the lens I noticed that it hadn’t been rated or commented upon for ages; this, I am sure, is because it had become a useless lens. Hopefully it might get rated again and receive some comments. I would guess that this is why there was a sudden drop in lensrank.

Or maybe Squidoo has some way of detecting that the links are broken and that the relevence of the lens is diminished by this and consequently it falls in rank? Is this a conceivable theory?

In future I will check the links in this lens and other similar lenses. I recommend that other people do as well if they have lenses which consist of link lists.

One of the iconic images of Bangkok is of colourful fruits and vegetables in old fashioned rowing boats, being paddled along a canal by quaint looking ladies in traditional Thai clothing. I went there last week for the first time after living in Bangkok for 13 years!

In fact the market isn’t in Bangkok. It is Ratchaburi province and it takes more than an hour to get there from central Bangkok. However, most people go there as a day trip from Bangkok, but is it worth the trip?

Well, when I got there I was somewhat disappointed. It is quite a small area, only a couple of hundred yards of canal and at first it seemed that there were more boatloads of tourists than boats selling Thai wares. In addition, the surrounding buildings were quite ugly and the overall scene was not very attractive really.

What happened next?

In an effort to make the best of a bad job I hunted around for photo opportunities and found that most of the Thai vendors were on the canal edges, in the shade and that it was possible to take lots of nice photos really easily. In the end my wife and I had a nice breakfast and took hundreds of photos.

The verdict was that the market is a good place for photography but the resulting photos somewhat oversell the overall impression of the market that I had. Still I have been here for years and maybe newcomers would find it more exciting than I did.

I used a few of the photos of the floating market, along with some older pictures of other things, to create a new lens – Bangkok Photo Album. Please have a look and if you like it favourite the lens as I will be adding lots more.

First I want to say thanks to AJ for viewing and blessing a whole bunch of my lenses it’s nice when someone does that.

Anyway, that came into my head because she turned up on one of my lenses yesterday and today I was checking out her Squidoo Etiquette lens. I was looking at this because I made a small breach of the unwritten rules yesterday by posting 3 lenses on a critique me request on the forums.

Whoops!

I should have known better.

So I ended up on AJ’s etiquette lens and learned a few things and reminded myself of a lot more. It is a lens worth favouriting and rereading at various times – the notes about thanking people who helped on lenses will certainly result in a few links for a couple of people who provided helpful comments to me.

Oh, and the Squid Etiquette lens has the Monty Python Spam sketch on it – worth a look just for that!

For ages  I have been toying with the idea of making a lens about those daft squidoo security words that we see when creating a lens or commenting on someone else’s lens. Finally I got around to doing it and had a bit of fun in the process.

Basically I gave a bunch of squidoo security words phoney definitions.

I let my imagination go a bit wild in creating the definitions and had to tone down my intial thoughts a few times. I left in a few potentially controversial things but I made fun of things I believe in as much as those that I don’t.

I hope that the lens makes a few people laugh : Squidoo Security Words Defined.

I like to think of myself as an environmentally aware person so recycling is something that comes naturally. Being a fan of recycling I thought about how to recycle some of the content I have written in the past on blogs that didn’t receive many visitors at the time because I didn’t know how to promote it properly then.

Squidoo is the perfect place to recycle my hard work of the past.

Of course, copying and pasting the old blog posts would be the easiest way of doing this but that seems daft to me and I wouldn’t feel good about my work if someone pulled me up on it, so instead I took the theme (and some of the photos) from the old blog post and rewrote it for squidoo, at the same time using some of the squidoo modules that can add elements that the original post did not contain – video clips were particularly nice to add to this article: Olive-backed Sunbirds.

I am fairly pleased with the way the lens has turned out and that I have recycled the content in a sensible way. I feel other “recycled” squidoo lenses coming on.

A few months ago I made my first squidoo page based on a keyword search. I came across the Adarna bird, a Philippine legend that was receiving around 120 searches per day and with only about 20000 pages it seemed like a good project.

Well, it was fairly easy to get into the first page of google but it would seem that there really are not enough searches for this term as the lens does not get that much traffic, probably an average of 10-15 per week which is only enough to keep it in tier 3.

Still, it was a worthwhile lesson for me and one that I can put to good use on other lenses.

After some efforts over the last few months I have now published 56 squidoo lenses. The newest of these is ESL Lessons: Story Writing for Elementary Students, which is an adaptation of an article I wrote for my own (long since defunct) ESL website.

This lens gives tips on how to get the best out of your students in a writing activity, by giving them a structured approach and leading them through the writing. This information was gained through trial and error and once I refined it, it held me in good stead for teaching ESL story writing.

Please take a look.