Squidoo Tips for Lensmasters

This web page will teach you how Squidoo lenses were made a few years ago, back when they were separate from Hub Pages. Includes how to fill out your bio, upload your photo or avatar, and rate. You can take a fun quiz about the lens modules.

For more help, you can go to the old forum at SquidU and read the help section, or go to the new forum at HQ. The link is on your dashboard.

These guides are written by excellent trustworthy lensmasters.

Learning About Squidoo

The first thing to do when you sign up for your Squidoo account is to choose your username. You need to be sure it is the one that you want, because you can't change it.

You should fill out your bio on your lensmaster page. It can be about anything that you have experience with or enjoy doing.

Then you should upload an avatar. It will appear on your lenses, on your lensmaster page, in the fan clubs and groups that you join, and on lenses that you favorite. You can use a photo of yourself or something that you like. You can change your avatar if you want to. You might have problems uploading it if it's a large file size or if you don't type something in your bio box first.

Color Choices

You can use themes to change the color of your background, titles, and links. You can see a list of them and change them when you edit, at the top right side of your workshop tools. The New York theme is the best if you don't want anything fancy. New holiday themes are available. Winter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines, and St. Paddys. Four new themes have been added. Big Lucid, Squid Grid, New York, and Bubble Gum. The newest one is for gardeners.

There are new garden, food, and craft clubs. See your quests tab for information.

How To and Tips

When you are ready to start your lens, click on Make a New Lens. First you choose the title of your lens and the URL and the topic category. Then choose the primary tag, and up to three more good tags. When you see the choice of I want to tell everybody about (your title), I want to sell things about..... you will get different modules to start with depending on your answer. You will have to add and delete some. If you choose I just want to do my own thing, then you won't get any modules and you can pick exactly the ones that you need.

You can also add more tags. You can have forty tags, but it's best to use ten to fifteen. The search engines may penalize your lens for keyword stuffing if you have more than fifteen tags.

You need to change all of the default titles such as New Guestbook, New Amazon, and rename them. The search engines use the titles as keywords to help your lens get found. You can change the Table of Contents title, also.

Your lens should also stay on the same topic. If your lens is about dogs, then all of your text, pictures, and everything that you sell on that lens should be only about dogs.

If you have less than three modules, your lens will be a work in progress and can't be viewed. For the best results, you should use more than five modules.

When your lens is published, it can be viewed, but you can't lensroll or join groups until after it gets ranked at the next lensrank update usually in the mornings in the United States, but in other countries it may be later.

There is a link below to some great lensmasters that have lenses with more information about specific parts of how to build a good lens.

With or Without HTML

There are a lot of different modules that will make your lenses more colorful and varied than just the plain text box and link list and you don't need to know any HTML to use them. You can start with the various modules and then add html or css to some of them later. I have examples of the modules that are used the most here on this page so that you can see what they look like.

When I first heard about Squidoo, I looked at the list of the top lenses and I looked through the helpful posts in the SquidU forum before I signed up. I learned everything that I could about making lenses before I started making them. There are a lot of very helpful pages about it.

I have a lot of experience with the internet and computers. I designed 5 different web sites in 1998 with HTML. I know a lot about JavaScript, but you can't use JavaScript at Squidoo. I can also write computer program software.

Did this help you learn about Squidoo?

If you don't know any html yet, you can use this to center your pictures on the page, and you can use just the photo without text.

Weather and Words

The countdown and the weather did not work when I tried to use them here. The weather widget and module work now. Here they are.

Tip: The Random Facts, Homer Simpson Quotes, Word of the Day, and other modules like that should only be used on a lens about words, facts or trivia. They are off the topic with anything else, and your lenses should always be about the same topic for the best results with lensrank, search engines, etc.

There are six different Amazon modules, but this one is the easiest to use. Sometimes the others show No Results if the search terms are not exactly right.

You can use this part to describe your products in more detail.

Remember to Change the Default Title Name.

The best place for this is at or near the bottom of a lens, to let your visitors read everything before they leave a comment.