5 Ways to Update a Stale Lens

Making sure that lenses are updated frequently with new content is a full time job. At the very least, a once monthly update is recommended to maintain a healthy lens rank. Not only does Squidoo appreciate your efforts to add new information, but your readers do, as well.

The trouble is, not every lens focuses on a topic that makes it into the news every month. Some lenses present a single concept, recipe or idea that leaves little room for written improvement. And there are only so many products on Amazon that any one subject can relate to.

So once you’ve eradicated every single typo, polished every bit of HTML, and added as many hyperlinks as you can think of, what is there to do?

Here are just 5 of the things I like to do when a lens needs it’s monthly brush up:

1. Change the lens photo.
It’s great to have a clear, relevant and interesting picture in the introduction module, and even better if your fans and readers recognize it when they see it.

Your profile picture should be like a familiar (and hopefully trusted) face, but lens photos don’t have to be. In fact, changing your lens photo once in awhile might encourage previous visitors to stop by and see what’s new.

2. Add a poll.
There are a million and one ways that polls can fit into all types of lenses. Polls allow your readers to compare products or ideas, answer questions, give feed back or rate a list of items. When I can’t think of anything else to do with a lens, I sometimes add a poll or a duel module.

3. Edit the lens bio.
You can add or change the greeting that is displayed in the bio area of your lens, or add some links to your lensography, blog or other places you’d like readers to go.

4. Optimize your pictures.
Are your lens pictures turning up in searches? If you’ve added the alt tag, then you’re probably already seeing Google traffic for your pics. If not, you need to check out Traffic from Image Searches.

5. Add a Lijit module.
Having a Lijit account is like having your own personal search engine. It includes only content that you make or recommend. When you add a Lijit module to a lens, you can create an account right in the workshop, and automatically add all of your published lenses to your network.

Lijit is a great way to let readers find other lenses, blog posts and content that you’ve created, and you can get keyword ideas and other stats with the traffic information that your account provides.

So, whenever you have 5 or 10 minutes to spare, you can do one of these things to your most stale lens and have it smelling fresh by the next rank update.

Dressing Up List Modules

In an effort to push up the lensrank of my holiday lenses, I've been trying to find ways to update them everyday. Ideally, this means adding new content, but the ideas don't always flow, so sometimes a tweak here and there is all I can make. A new lens photo, tag, or Amazon description is usually where I start.

I was looking over That's Creative: Unique Gift Baskets, trying to think of ways to improve the exsiting content. The entire lens is made up mostly of list modules, and I thought it was time to give them a little more pizzaz. The logical choice is, of course, pictures. Visual content is essential for a great lens, even when the information is already in easy-to-read point form.

Because Unique Gift Baskets has so many examples where a photo would fit, it would be pretty overwhelming to take dozens of photos of candy and gift items. That's where Allposters comes in. The difficult part is getting the posters to fit into the list modules in a neat and tidy way. But I did it, and now I'd like to pass on the method to other Squids.

Step 1 - Find your picture.
Once you've added your lens to your list of Allposters websites, and located an appropriate poster, highlight the HTML for a thumbnail with no printing or framing links.

Step 2 - Edit the HTML
Remove all of the code up to the first img tag. You will be left with something like this:

a class="APCTitleAnchor" href=allposters url target="_blank" title="Close View of a Reddish Colored Giant Or Humboldt Squid at Night"
img src= allposters url Close View of a Reddish Colored Giant Or Humboldt Squid at Night" border="0" height="86" width="115"

Step 3 - Set Alignment
To place the picture to the left of your list text, replace
border="o" height="86" width="115"
with
style="float: left; margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;"/

Step 4 - Add Text
You need at least 6 lines of text and/or spaces to make sure that your list items all line up evenly. Use a BR tag in the seventh line to break up the list items and add a little space.

And that's it. You'll end up with list items that look something like this:


The Humboldt Squid at Night
This reddish colored squid photo was taken by Brian J. Skerry.
Isn't it neat?

The more text you have in each list item, the better it will look. It's a great way to dress up tired list modules, and add some color to your lens.