What is a web lens and should we care?

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
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paolo
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What is a web lens and should we care?

Post by paolo »

What is a web lens? How is it different to a blog? What are the benefits of having one for a rental owner or property manager?
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craigkillick
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Post by craigkillick »

A lense is a new kind of web page. It is a page (like a directory) on a site called Squidoo. Squidoo is the brain child of Seth Godin (author of Permission Marketing).

The simple concept is that 'Everyone is an expert on something'.

In my search to 'aggregate' myself and my projects on the web, this is one tool I am using in the 'armery'.

You can easily create a page (with lots of links) about something you are an expert on.

My question would be: Where is your property and how could you talk about that area, etc.? Where is there a synergy that could create traffic for your web site?

It may be spitting in the wind, but I am having good results with it for two lenses I have created:

http://www.squidoo.com/charitycycling/
http://www.squidoo.com/ukbusinessblogging/

I will soon be creating one for the area where my property is in Cyprus.

I won't honestly say this will make a difference - but it's FREE and it's easy.
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

Web lenses, Squidoo et al, is a new web 2.0 concept but I haven't seen much evidence on this forum of people letting go of web 1.0 yet.

With the exception of the rental listings site Holiday Havens and 1 other lesser known one, I haven't seen many commercial holiday accommodation sites use RSS to any great effect, let alone web lenses. And as for the heavyweight players in the current zeitgeist such as Technorati, del.icio.us etc, who have pioneered social bookmarking, I haven't seen any evidence yet of these powerful resources being tapped by aforementioned listings sites. There's a few reasons for that, which I'll let them find out for themselves :wink:

For anyone to take advantage of web lenses or any of the other sites mentioned, they should ideally have RSS news feeds on their sites and their sites should be constantly updated - I can't see much call for that on an owners' site unless they're blogging about a particular country/region/city with news as and when that happens.

By constantly updated I don't mean updating your availability calender in a bid to rise in the rankings of listing sites, I mean new, fresh content.
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

I won't honestly say this will make a difference - but it's FREE and it's easy.
And very slow :wink:
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paolo
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Post by paolo »

craigkillick wrote:My question would be: Where is your property and how could you talk about that area, etc.? Where is there a synergy that could create traffic for your web site?
Is a lens inherently 'better' than just another webpage or site about your property and area? In either case you would have to rewrite all your content so as to avoid duplication. I read that search engines love blogs, are lenses also good spider food?

Isn't it more a way to leverage what you know about to earn Adsense income?
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Garri
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Post by Garri »

I read that search engines love blogs
There was a discussion re: blogging, before my hiatus, but I feel that many people misunderstood modern day blogging and pigeonholed it as being an on-line diary thingy. It's not, it's much more than that.

Possibly the reason why search engines love blogs is because they are inherently semantically structured web sites - there is meaning to the content they contain. It that sense, you could say that blogs are SEO straight out of the box although you'll still have to work on providing good content and information architecture.

Since blogs are, usually, so well coded they are also light on overheads and no doubt spiders love them because it's all laid on - they don't have to do much work. If there's less overhead on the search engines' servers then that saves them time and money, so you can see why they can feel the love!
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