Topicability, Topicability, Topicability

Topicability, Topicability, Topicability as in Location, Location, Location! What does Topicability have to do with Location? Well, if you are into real estate you undoubtedly know that the mantra for selling real estate is "location, location, location." That is, the importance of location as it relates to a property being hot or prime for a sale.

Likewise, topicability carries that type of importance with regards to a Squidoo lens, blog post, website, or ANY online news article for that matter. The higher the topicability quotient, the higher the prime index of that page. The higher the prime index of that page will generally mean:

• higher traffic count
• more returning visitors
• longer visits

A compelling argument for topicability is demonstrated by this chart of some typical visit lengths. A whopping 82.6% of visits are less than 5 seconds which isn't enough time to read the entire page, but enough time to quickly scan the page -- like an Evelyn Wood speed reader -- and move on to the next page. The next time segment of 5 to 30 seconds accounts for 4.4% of visits and is still not enough time to adequately evaluate the page.

30 seconds to 5 minutes accounts for 6.6% of the visits which works on short lenses for enough time to assess the gist of the page. 5 to 20 minutes accounts for 2.5% of visit length which is also about the percentages I was schooled to expect for a direct marketing campaign. Slightly less than 1.0% @ 0.8% of the visit length are 20 minutes to an hour! That would seem to mean that you have engaged your reader fairly well.

What is interesting to note is that visit lengths of longer than an hour or 3.1% of the total exceeds the expected average of most direct marketing and online campaigns. Visitors are spending time reading Squidoo lenses and checking out other lenses in lensmasters' profiles.

If you've got a cooking lens, you might have interested a few thousand people to try one of your recipes. If you've written a 'how-to' lens, you're probably helping out some newbies. If you've spotlighted a hot ticket item, you've probably caught some reader's eye. If you've got the traffic, you've probably clicked with the topicability index.

After all, if you build it, they will come!