If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

What is an algorithm?

A riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma comes close in best describing it.

Lensrank is Squidoo’s way of determining what is the best content on the site. Number 1 being the highest, and — some number currently over the three hundred thousand mark — being the lowest.

How does it work? What does it do? Why should I care?

We’ll be investigating the facts, rumors and myths in an upcoming SquidU exclusive: Lensrank Exposed!

Coming soon!

This is the first in our series on how to use simple optimization techniques to get the best mileage from your content. Part one of the series is on creating a link title.

Link Titles: The title should be 5 to 10 words long at most. It should contain the 2 to 3 primary keyword/phrases that you’ve chosen, and little else. Remember, it’s kind of like an ad headline, so it should be designed to attract clicks from those who find you in a search. You can use vertical bars, dashes, or commas to separate the different items:

Free Online Writing Course | Learn to Write ebooks

Now what you may not know is that you can only expect the first 65 characters of the title to show up on a search result page – more than that, and it will get cut off most of the time. Most search engines truncate the title somewhere between 50 and 70 characters.

Because the title is also the click-able link in the search results, you would like to have the actual search term appear in the first 65 characters, because the search engines will display the matching keywords in bold, which will improve the click through rate for your listing.

Try to make meaningful title’s by using the right keywords as per your lens. Keep it within 65 characters and try not to use “Stop Words”. Avoid using special characters (i.e @,#,$.%.!) in your title, as they do nothing but muck up the message your trying to convey. The title is very prominent on the serp’s, and for long term success it should be human friendly, not for search engines.

After all it’s the humans you want.