My household is a bit unusual – but I think you may have already realised that! Here we are a married couple, between us we have four kids, all four are mine, the two youngest are ours Hubby is a very clever man, working on all sorts of complicated stuff to do with the environment, but the Computer Geek in this family is moi!

I am the one who sets up PCs, networks them, troubleshoots email problems and generally keeps up with new developments. And I enjoy it – well most of the time.

I am so modern that I use Firefox AND I no longer use Outlook Express for my emails! But from time to time I get fed up with stuff that is not working well and then try to find out how to fix it.

A few days ago, Firefox was driving me bonkers. It was slow to load and I was frequently having problems when I had a lot of browser tabs open. So I did some research.

I found out that the default Firefox configuration does not always work well for those of us who do a lot of research on the internet – or those of us who do not close tabs when we have finished with them and before we know it we have a dozen open!

I found all sorts of information about how to speed up Firefox, but realised that for a lot of people, the way the info was presented may put them off trying to make some changes to their Firefox Configuration.

So I made a lens: Is Firefox Slow?

As usual, I spent some time doing some keyword research and was disappointed to find that my preferred URL was already taken up by another Squidoo lensmaster. However, when I checked out the resulting lens, I could see that it is not getting traffic – presumably because the Lensmaster does not appear to be active either on Squidoo or establishing backlinks.

My keyword research turned up some great words and phrases that will be useful on the Year of the Tiger Tattoos blog as well as the lens, so it will be interesting to see how it does.

The lens is also providing useful Backlinks to the Blog, but as is my usual habit these days, I wont be linking back to the lens from the Blog.

I have been watching my Squidoo dashboard a lot more recently thanks to the massive increase in traffic to my lens Robbie Williams Wedding and it was a comment by Rich on my blog Ask AJ that also reminded me that my own SEO is severely neglected as I checked out the Backlinks on one of his wife’s lenses.

An analysis of my Squidoo Dashboard showed me that, in addition to 3 or 4 lenses that usually maintain an average to keep them in Tier 1, I have a good number that are nicely established in Tier 2 and 3. This, despite the fact that they have been sorely neglected by me over the past few months.

Why are these lenses doing well? Because the majority were published following some very thorough keyword research. Google likes them as a result, but Google would like them even more if I built up more quality backlinks.

Note to moi: Do more work on Backlinks!

The lens that I made last November as the result of a news item has just become very, very topical! The original news announcement was that Robbie Williams had proposed to his girlfriend Ayda Field and that they were going to get married. I am a Robbie Williams fan and in anticipation of a huge showbiz wedding, I quickly made a lens and waited to see what would happen.

My bubble of anticipation was well and truly burst when Robbie Williams announced in his blog a few days later that it was a joke. I was left with a lens that should have been updated with details of a wedding that was not going to happen.

I had a choice: delete the lens or update it with a link to Robbie Williams’ blog and then wait and see.

The lens continued to get traffic and earned me a few cents as it stayed in Tier 3. Traffic increased around Valentine’s Day, when it was rumoured that the wedding was going to happen. But it didn’t.

But yesterday, Friday 06 August 2010, I was checking some lens stats when I noticed a sudden spike in visits to the lens. I had not had the radio on during the day, so I had not picked up on any news but I have an RSS news feed on the lens and followed a link. Bingo! All the indications were that Robbie Williams would be getting married today or tomorrow.

(By the way RSS News feeds are a great way for you to keep up with the latest headlines relating to your lens topic and can provide info to enable you to easily update your lens to keep it fresh.)

A quick check on Google, shows the lens at #2 for the phrase Robbie Williams Wedding and boy is the traffic flowing to the lens!

I have never watched my lens stats like I have watched these lens stats over the last 24 hours. I have never had so many visits to a lens in 24 hours!

Currently ranked at 13, 547 now, all I have to do is wait for Lensrank to update…….

1. A method to keep track of links to content, especially blog entries
2. A snippet of text joined to an entry from another website linking to it

I am finding a good number of trackbacks are linking to my blogs. Some are from my own blogs, when I refer to related articles but I am finding other blogs are trying to link to mine as well.

Many  are obviously using some sort of automated system to link to any blog that features specific keywords and I then have to make a judgement call as to whether I will allow their trackback and yes, I delete the majority of them.

The latest blog that tried to get a backlink from this blog is obviously set up to feature anything that has the keyword Squidoo. When I checked the link, I found lots of links to Squidoo lenses and blogs. Most of them are what I would consider to be quality.

However, the blog that is hosting these links is not quality in my book. There’s no original content, there’s nothing about the author and despite the fact that the blog has been updating regularly since 2008, it has no Google Page Ranking.

I can’t work out what the author is doing. There’s no Google adsense modules. In fact there’s nothing except links to lots of lenses, blogs and articles about Squidoo. I wonder if he set up the blog, set up the automated harvesting of Squidoo links and then forgot about it.

If anyone can explain the reason for blogs like this, I would love to hear it. In the meantime, I have deleted the trackback, although I will contine to get a backlink from the blog. However, was this wise or should I just leave it?

I last posted the stats for my Year of the Tiger Tattoos Blog on April 29, 2010 and at the time things were looking good. Traffic was building and I had made a sale. Since then I have been posting pretty regularly and have come up with various ideas to keep the blog fresh and updated.

At the end of April I reported that the blog had:

• 16 posts
• 32 comments
• 1 sale
• 2931 visits

And here’s the visits I reported:

• Feb = 173
• Mar = 857
• Apr = 1898

Here’s the stats up to and including July 27, 2010 (yesterday)

• 24 posts (could do better)
• 52 comments
• 5 sales (could do better)
• 13,053 visits (Oh My Gosh!)

The visits can be broken down as follows:

• Feb = 173
• Mar = 857
• Apr =2,038
• May = 2,521
• June = 3,949
• July = 3,515 (up to July 27)

So why do I love David Beckham?

An analysis of the search terms that are bringing people to the blog shows that over 4,000 have the word “Beckham” in the search phrase. It’s a classic example of where a keyword you had not anticipated can become very important to your blog. Not all the searches were about David Beckham, some were about his wife Victoria.

Although David Beckham does not have a tiger tattoo, he does have a Chinese tattoo. This is easy to work into the blog from time to time, but to help me do this I need to keep up with news about David and Victoria Beckham. So I have set up a couple of new Google Alerts for “David Beckham” and “Victoria Beckham” to make sure I don’t miss anything that could be relevant to the blog.

As far as Backlinks are concerned, I have a total of 40 DoFollow links, all from quality sites, which have helped the Blog to establish a Google Page Rank of 1. My next task is to try to increase these Backlinks.

A search on Google for “Year of the tiger tattoos” shows the first six links to the Year of the Tiger Tattoos blog and other related sites that promote the Blog. The links to related images are all my images.

All in all I am very happy with the progress I have made with this blog. But what I do have to do is continue working on converting the traffic into sales.

I need to find quality tattoo products that I will feel happy to promote. Clickbank is an obvious place to start, but I have already found that the site for one product that appeared to be quality is not delivering what it promises, so I need to have a good look around and see what else I can find.

This whole project has been an amazing learning experience for me and I am so thankful to Alex Crabtree for all his help and support

For months I have been planning to do a cupcake lens and after my very hectic few weeks on Squidoo I needed some therapy. I love creating Squidoo lenses and so this week I indulged in some leisurely keyword research and some lens creation.

I knew I wanted to make a cupcake lens with a difference and link it into my interest in the environment and my Going Green Ideas blog so I set about researching a combination of phrases related to “environmentally friendly”, “eco friendly” and “cupcakes”. In the course of that research I discovered that what I thought would be killer keywords, were not being searched on at all, which once again reinforced the advice I always give (as do others) that to assume you know what phrases people are using in search terms is very dangerous!

However, the research did turn up some great phrases that I would be able to work into the lens and I was also dead chuffed (English slang for very happy) to discover that not only was the URL green cupcakes free on Squidoo, but the webpages using that phrase were not making optimum use of it in their URLs or title tags.

I must admit that I dont religiously establish Link Wheels for all my Squidoo lenses, but I have done just that for this lens because I believe it has great potential to do well and it will be worth the effort in the long run.

And of course this post forms part of the Green Cupcakes Link Wheel. More info about that coming soon…..

The majority of lenses that I see advertised for sale are perfectly “safe” to buy, but occasionally I come across something that makes me wince. So before thinking about buying a lens that someone else has written, it makes sense to run a few checks:

• check that all outgoing links do not take you to sites that are recommending products or linking to other sites that are Squiddonts
• if you are not a Giant Squid, then ensure that the 9 outgoing links to the same website rule is being complied with
• run a plagiarism check

What is plagiarism?

Susanna Duffy has a very good lens that will leave you in no doubt as to what constitutes plagiarism: Is it plagiarism?

How to check for plagiarism?

Copy a couple of sentences, paste into a Google search box and see if the exact same phrase appears on other websites. Repeat with other sentences. You will soon be able to tell if the phrases in the lens have been “lifted” from other sites or if the lens publisher owns the content on another site.

However, if any of the content appears on sites that are “leaders” in their topic e.g the International Movie DataBase (IMDB) or the BBC, just to give a couple of examples, then it is probably safe to assume that these sites are the original posters of the content.

Lenses that violate the Squidoo TOS get locked. The Lensmaster’s reputation suffers.  You could have weeks of grief as you try to sort it out, not to mention the fact that you may also struggle to get your money back.

It makes sense to do just a few checks, that will only take you a few minutes.

I have been reminding myself of my own tips, which I published in my Squidoo Lens: WAHM Time Management Tips and I have been doing what I always do at times like this, organising my commitments on an Excel Spreadsheet.

My blogging schedule

With eight blogs to maintain, plus various other contributions I make to other sites, not to mention my Lenses, I find it easier to organise and, more importantly, keep to a schedule if I have it to look at in front of me. The screenshot shows my partially completed schedule and today I have been posting the content due for publishing today. I have also been drafting and scheduling the posts due during the rest of this week.

I decided not to plan ahead of time exactly what I will blog about, because I find that I often need to change it around, particularly when something happens. For example if news suddently broke that David Beckham has a new Chinese tattoo then that would be such a big story, I would have to make it a priority on my Year of the Tiger Tattoos blog, because David Beckham’s tattoos get me a lot of traffic.

Whatever planning you do, you need to build in some flexibility in order to allow yourself to be topical. I still have to work some of my blogs and writing into the spreadsheet, but at least I am now on the way to getting better organised.

And what a couple of two weeks! Here’s an update….

On 06 July, I did my “first Tuesday” slot with Alex on Giant Squid Open Mike and learned I had been given a Squidoo Sunshine Award for my Free Tony the Tiger lens.

I applied for the Giant Squid 100 Club and learned that I was successful on July 08.

We were working flat out to help our  Community Manager Paula Atwell complete the move from Ning to establish Professional Squids as a nested site on 10-finity.com

And then we embarked on a major revsion of the Squidoo Step by Step Guidebook, which was published on 10 July, which coincided with my 2 year Squidversary.

Then this Tuesday, 13 July, I heard I had won another Squidoo Sunshine Award, this time for Mimi’s Birthday, which will benefit OhMe’s Friends of the Park.

Hectic? Yes! Wonderful? You bet!