It sure is nice to see the improvements made by Squidoo since the time of your blog post.

Just the change in the title structure alone is a big SEO boost.

When someone makes a lens with hope that it will rank well in the search engines, there are most definitely certain Squidoo SEO techniques that need to be paid attention to.

Search engine ranking of a Squidoo lens is not just luck and is far from all about how fresh your content is or how ‘pretty’ your lens looks =)

What happens OFF your Squidoo lens is a very important factor…very. (hint)

Thanks for the great blog! It is a joy to read !

An update on the “title tag” since this article was written… it seems Sqidoo has moved the lensmaster’s keywords to the front (which is good, probably, for SEO).

So a lensmaster’s site might now read: “keyword or keyword phrase on Squidoo” (rather than “Squido being up front).

Andy, Yes. I am a developer first and formost so all my websites have been hand coded just because that is what I am used to. I initialy started indenting HTML but soon realised it was just a waste of bandwidth.

Not only does removing ALL whitespace characters mean the search engine bots have to read through less, so does your visitors browser (i.e. quicker page loading) and you also reduce your bandwith costs.

Most bots have enough data to wade through to find the actual page content you want indexing without adding more unecessary bytes that just get ignored.

Of course whitespace is only the start and simplest to remove.

Finally a tip for you Andy…
You can get the pages working with indented HTML, then save a copy and on the original do a simple search and replace to remove the tabs.

I spent a long time on one of my blogs ensuring that the code is properly indented, because believe me, it’s too complicated to spend ages working out where the DIV tag or some other piece of code should go if it’s not well formatted. SEs shouldn’t really care too much about either the formatting or of Javascript.

John Battelle sums it up the best:

“…it’s built to attract search crawlers and to rank well in search, increasing the value of Adsense and other monetization schemes (there’s that word again) such as affiliate networks.”

You can check out his post here. You can see in his “UPDATE” that he enjoys Squidoo and so do I :)

It seems they still have some work to do, so perhaps they’ll see your post here and take your advice. It will be interesting to see how the lenses work out.

Ultimately their success in optimizing their pages will be determined by the popularity of the project – and if it does become huge then they will get away with much SEO sins that those of us with much smaller sites wouldn’t.

I think we all have a lot to learn as to what role Lenses might play – maybe very little, or perhaps as Squidoo would like we’ll have successful lenses about lenses.

Keywords are all but ignored, and description tags “might” show in your site’s description in the SERPS, but that really has nothing to do with SEO, it is more of a HEO (human engine optimization).

The actual generated HTML could do with cleaning up by removing the TAB indenting and putting the java scrips in to a separate file, although this could be said for many auto generated Web Pages/Blogs.