Squidoo have overhauled their lens editor, and today released Workshop 2.0! The guys at HQ have done a wonderful job, and have really improved the lens editing experience. (You may need to click on a link in the top corner if you’re still getting the old dashboard.)
The first thing you’ll notice is that your lens

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A couple months ago, Seth Godin wrote a blog post about critical mass, and how it applies to social networking. There was this particular paragraph that resonated with me:
“If you have a presence on twitter, squidoo, blogs, facebook, myspace, linkedin and 20 other sites, the chances of finding critical mass at any of them is

Some of the best places to get backlinks to your lenses are directories. These are websites that collect and categorize links to other websites, and there are a growing number of directories specifically tailored to Squidoo Lenses.
I have been assessing the relative merits of these Squidoo directories, and I have put together this review of

I have been sitting on this latest tool for a few months, but only recently have I sorted out the last few issues that prevented me from releasing it.
I think I am now ready to show you what I’ve been working on.
This tool is for anyone who uses the Amazon Links or RSS Feeds

Squidcasts. These are short messages that you can send out from your lens, and they will be seen by anyone who has favorited your lens, or joined your fan club. To see the squidcasts from the lenses and Lensmasters you have subscribed to, you have to visit the Favorites tab on your dashboard.
On their own,

To contact the administrator of SquidUtils.com, you can use the form below. If you are having problems with something on the site, then please tell me your Lensmaster name and give as much detail as you can. Thanks.

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After my previous post about how tag pages aren’t indexed, I felt it was time to step back and take a fresh look at tags and what they are good for.
When you create a new lens, the creation wizard asks you for one Primary Tag, and three other tags. When you edit your lens, you

If you thought tagging was good for search engine traffic, you’d be wrong!
For a long time, it has been common wisdom that adding tags to your lens would help it rank better on the search engines. In theory, your lens would receive link juice from these pages, loaded with relevance and PageRank.
There’s plenty of advice

SquidUtils has been running on a new server for a couple weeks now, as you may or may not have noticed. I was forced to do the switch over a little earlier than I had planned, but (I think) everything is working now. The few features I had to disable before have now been turned

Recently, SquidUtils has been suffering from some serious server issues, and it was offline for several hours last night. A few functions are still not quite right, and I’m working with support to get the resolved as soon as possible. A few other minor services have been disabled while I work out some issues with

If you don’t already know, the prime purpose of SquidUtils is to provide tools and utilities for Lensmasters. You can get a summary of what’s on offer here by reading the post Welcome to SquidUtils, and then come back here to catch up with what’s new.
In recent weeks, I have been building some new tools,

I have analysed almost 70 thousand lenses at Squidoo by 2,250 Lensmasters, and I’ve identified a number of issues that common to a staggering 80% of these lenses. Some of these issues are preventing the lenses from ranking well in the Search Engines, and many Lensmasters have posted to the forums complaining about a

One of the oldest tools here at SquidUtils is the Lensmaster Feeds. These are RSS Feeds that contain links to all of your lenses (or groups). These are perfect for syndicating - which will result in many websites linking directly to your lenses. And the great thing is, as you build new lenses, they will

The Amazon Link Error Report alerts you when your lenses have Amazon Links that have been changed or deleted. It will also tell you which lenses these links are on, so you can then go to your workshop and fix them. All you need to do is login, and look out for the warning message

One of the most common pieces of advice these days seems to be “write good, unique content”. While this is true, there’s a word that I seem to use a lot in my forum posts: “relevance”.
Why? Search engines love to make associations between ‘things’ that are related - this is how they work. Ultimately, they

The great thing about Squidoo is that you can sell Amazon products on your lens, without needing to sign up as an Amazon Associate first. There are 4 great Amazon modules that you can add to your lens. Squidoo handles all of that on your behalf, gets the maximum commission rate, and splits the revenue

Originally posted on SquidU Forum as The Importance of Primary Tags.
The Primary Tag is the first tag you are asked to define when creating your new lens, and it is an often misunderstood and poorly utilised by many Lensmasters. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem do a whole lot, but there are some important points you should

First of all, let me take this opportunity to introduce myself. I joined Squidoo in September of 2006, and I’ve build a few lenses in that time, which I have showcased in my Lensography. I think that Squidoo is a fabulous platform, and I have been contributing my bit to its development, as well as