Search Engine Calendar

Submitting lenses to search engines is often one of the first things we Squids do once we’ve successfully published a great new lens. Those experts that recommend this practice also say that it’s a good idea to re-submit every 4-6 weeks, or any time your lens has a major update such as new information, links or a fresh layout.

This may seem like an easy task when you only have a few lenses under your belt, but the job of keeping your lenses up to date with Google and Yahoo can become overwhelming when your list of lenses continues to grow. How do you remember when you last submitted your lens on humming birds, and did you forget to submit your latest lens on diaper bags?

My solution to this problem is a simple text file that sits quietly on my dashboard. Whenever I make a new lens I open up my “URL Submissions” folder and paste the complete url for my latest masterpiece. Then I type in the date, and head on over to the
Big 3 and beg for a crawl.

After doing major updates, I will open up the file and check to see when my last submission was. If it’s been more than a month, I will copy the url of the lens I want to refresh and re-submit it to Google, Yahoo and MSN. By typing in the date, I’ll have a record of my activity for next time.

As a bonus, this handy little file contains urls for all of my lenses, so I don’t have to remember them all. I can usually recall the addresses for each of my lenses if I think about it, but to date I’m only at 27. Remembering what I called my latest page on beads might be more difficult when I’m working with 50 lenses or more. Being able to quickly link to your lenses on other sites is key to promoting your work on Squidoo.

Of course, you may be one who believes you should not submit your lens to search engines. It's probably true that backlinks are better for promotion than hand submission. I like to use both!