Monday, May 23, 2011

Page Break Lenses

If you've got page break lenses then you'll be in the same boat as me right now and trying to think what to do with them.   When I first heard that they were going I tried to stick my head in the sand like an ostrich as the past few months seem to have been nothing but changing and updating things to keep up with different rules (I'm talking about all online sites now, not just Squidoo).

It is time to take action however and the first thing I did was reassess my page break lenses before doing anything, want to take the page break journey with me?   The first lens I'm going to update is my Disney Princess Christmas Ornaments lens which I hope doesn't suffer too much from this upheaval.

  • First I went through and checked my traffic stats to see what keywords had brought traffic to my site.
  • Second I went through and noted every sale made on the site.
Looking at my lenses a couple of things struck me and I did my keyword research again and discovered that Disney's Little Mermaid Christmas Ornaments ranked higher than Disney Princess Ariel which was a change from when I first set the original lens up.   So a bright note with 'having' to do this work is that it's a great time to check keywords because they do change as a fellow Lensmaster explains well in her Keyword Freshness blog post.

I decided that without the page breaks this lens would be much too long so my first step was deciding on how I was going to break the lens up.   I did some keyword research and determined 10 different (extra) lenses that I could make from this main one and what I would call them all............now I don't know if there's enough products available for all ten so I focused on the five page break pages first and produced - Cinderella Christmas Ornaments.   I basically just cut and pasted what was on my second page of the original lens, adding a  heading to the introduction.   Next I decided it needed to be a little more interactive and so I added a couple of polls.

I still want people to click through the different Disney Princess Christmas ornaments so I added a featured lens module to link it back to the main lens.   I added a bookmark module, guestbook and a featured lens module on the bottom linking to my Christmas Ornament lensography.

I decided to utilize the sidebar widgets and included other Cinderella Christmas decor which included Cinderella Christmas stockings.   At the moment this is all duplicate content because I haven't deleted the page on my original lens, but luckily they've taken the filter down as I don't want to mess with the original until I've got all of the extra lenses done - I hope Google doesn't have a fit about it.

Now to the next lens which I'm basically going to approach like this one and this one is on Snow White.

Here is the completed Snow White Christmas Ornaments lens - again I simply cut and pasted from the page break lens and added a poll for interaction, side bar widgets, guestbook and bookmarking module.

This one was a little quicker to do so there is hope that I can complete this whole page break lens reorganization in one day!

I have now completed my Sleeping Beauty Christmas Ornaments lens and as with the other two it was basically cutting and pasting from my fourth lens break page and adding side bar widgets, poll, guestbook etc.   I'm starting to feel like this isn't so bad, although I haven't got to sorting out the main page yet so my feelings may yet change!

I've just completed this lens - Disney's Little Mermaid Christmas Ornaments, the keywords for Little Mermaid Christmas Ornaments were a lot better than Ariel Christmas Ornaments which was what my page break page had been titled.   I'm not sure if it's a case of the keywords have changed or because of the title character limit that the page break module had.

Again the majority of this lens is basically a cut and paste of the existing page so it was quite quick to pull together.

All of these lenses are obviously going to need some individual tweeking when it's all over, but luckily there's still plenty of time before Christmas.

This next lens has been called Beauty and the Beast Christmas Ornaments, again the page of the page break lens was entitled Belle Christmas Ornaments but whether that was all that could fit or whether the keywords have changed I'm not sure.

These are the five additional pages that were on the main Disney Princess Christmas Ornaments lens along with the main page so I'm going to start to work on the main page now and link them all together.

I'm going to leave the first few modules of the main lens alone and then after my collectible Cinderella and Snow White Christmas Ornament set I'm going to add a featured lens module to link to the individual Cinderella and Snow White lenses.

Next I added a poll under this and I've woven the other featured lenses in between amazon links for the remaining Disney Princesses.

One piece of advice - remember if your page break lens is an older one it will be grandfathered with the number of amazon modules allowed so do not delete any unless you're absolutely sure you've used enough.

I was missing Tiana so I moved some of the amazon spotlights from the Cinderella page up to add a couple of her Christmas ornaments.

I only had one Rapunzel ornament and when I checked Amazon I found a couple more so again I moved spotlights up from the other page breaks and changed them to Rapunzel ones.

Now I've checked the preview and it's time to delete all of the page break pages - a couple of deep breaths and here I go!

Well it worked!   This is the end result of my revised Disney Princess Christmas Ornaments and I got it all done before school finished.

In conclusion I don't think this one was so bad, but who knows about the others.   I hope that by following me along as I did this first page break restructure it will help you with yours.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing your process. I haven't spent as much time on my lenses, but I had a lot to do.

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  2. It's been a very profitable lens in season so I wanted to spend a bit of time getting it 'right'.

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  3. One thing with Squidoo changes, it does help move one along to update lenses! Looks like you've made some good choices. : )

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