What is a Squidoo Lens and How Do You Optimize It?
For all of us who spent years, it seems, learning SEO techniques in order to drive traffic to our sites, Squidoo is a brand new game.
To optimize your Squidoo lens, you cannot rely on the old SEO techniques. And yet, SEO is part of the Squidoo game.
First, a little background will help you understand Squidoo. Squidoo allows you to create a lens that focuses people on a specific topic. When you set up your account, you set up keywords or tags as Squidoo calls them. You don’t have to understand the concept of keyword density.
You don’t have to worry about H-Tags, meta-tags, or long tails either. This is because Squidoo is set up to handle these issues for you. The SquidTeam takes the tags and other information you fill into the automatically set up pages for you and create the html that optimizes your Squidoo site for you.
Anyone who has ever lost sleep trying to optimize their site is in for a real delightful surprise with Squidoo. SEO is built into the site design. All you have to do is use the Squidoo tools and your site basically optimizes itself.
You can add in attractive modules that give you an advertising edge. Among the modules you can add are YouTube, Guestbook, Polls, RSS Feeds, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Plexo. You don’t need to know the first thing about html or coding.
Squidoo is a flip from the way websites used to work. The deal then was to get lots and lots of SEO pages in the hope that the sheer numbers would get the site to Google’s first page. The content mattered so little that there was a booming business in article spinners and automatically generated pages.
Squidoo is all about content and looks at quality over quantity. The lensmaster (that would be you) takes the best of what’s online and using the tools, focuses the reader on the topic by offering the most comprehensive information possible.
The more concise and up-to-date your lens is, the more attention you can attract. Think of a Squidoo page as a minisite. You take a single topic and you focus on that topic, digging deep into the topic.
The secret is to make the site informative. Because Squidoo does the SEO work for you, you can focus on rounding up all the information related to your topic. This makes your readers’ experience comprehensive. Rather than dig through hundreds or thousands of Google pages, the reader can simply get all the information from your Squidoo site.
Optimizing Squidoo’s Lensrank
On Squidoo, the focus in on generating traffic using content and credibility and increasing your lensrank. The higher the lensrank, the higher your credibility.
You can strategize your lensrank to move it up the ranks in Squidoo. There is a special reward for breaking into the top 100. There is a special showcase for the top 100 lensranked pages.
The current top 100 include some pretty narrow subject such as laptop bags, Webkinz, and Coach handbags. In other words, your topic is not nearly as important as your technique.
The winning technique for optimization include letting your personality show through the use of the interactive modules that are part of the Squidoo experience. The end goal is to have your Squidoo site as interactive as possible.
Interactivity gets your lens more attention on the search engines, a high lensrank, and a bigger and better subscriber base.
You should use some of the old-fashioned ways to draw traffic such as participating in online discussions. Forums are a great place to meet people who might be interested in your Squidoo information.
You put your Squidoo lens in your sig file and mention it in your posts. If you have a mailing list, use it to get the word out.
Blogs and email sig files are also excellent places to mention your Squidoo lens.
If you already have a website, write about your Squidoo lens and link it to Squidoo.
This is part one of the traffic exercise – getting the word out. People will go to your Squidoo to see what it is all about. Of course, just like with the old SEO world of regular websites, you have to keep it fresh to have people return. If they don’t return, soon your lensrank will begin to drop.
The bigger the lens, the better. Up to a point. While it only takes 10 minutes to build a Squidoo lens, you need to keep adding to it. Add a module at a time, write a short article. It only takes 250 or 300 words to make a nice entertaining article.
But as I said above, big is only good up to a point. The reason for Squidoo is to keep people from being overwhelmed. If your site is too big, well, it can be overwhelming.
But you have all this interesting stuff! Well, what you do is build another lens and link them together.
Building a Squidoo lens is easy. Because the Squidoo team have all the engineering done for you, you don’t have to play around with creating the site. You can focus on getting the word out.
More traffic begets higher ranking, and in turn this attracts more traffic. It’s a lot easier to have one thing to focus on. With Squidoo, the one thing you need to focus on is getting as many traffic streams as possible flowing into your Squidoo lens.
Using Squidoo’s Optimization Tools
In order to optimize Squidoo, it helps to understand its structure. Once you know how Squidoo functions, you will be able to use it more efficiently and effectively.
When you set up Squidoo, the very first step is to choose a title for your lens. You don’t have to know html or anything about setting up a web site. You simply answer the lens wizard’s first question which is “What is your lens about?”
Your answer will be the title of your page. However, don’t fret about the answer right now because you can always change it at a later date.
The next question will be what your site’s tags are. The tags are nothing more or less than keywords.
You then get to pick a main keyword to use as your lens title – this will be part of your site’s URL. The URL will be like this: www.squidoo.com/yourkeyword. And guess what? You can change this too.
The last question in setting up your lens is if you want to donate any of your page’s revenue to charity.
At this point, you end up in the lensmaster workshop. This is where you get to design your lens with modules. There are dozens of modules so you just have to focus on a few at a time.
You also have a bio section. By the way, this is a very important section so be sure to maximize it. Be clear about what you have to offer here. Be descriptive. Squidoo is a place where personality counts.
The secret to Squidoo is that the whole point is about being the ultimate expert on your topic. This means that you have to let your bio show that you know what you are talking about.
It’s an internet thing. But the reality of the internet is that it’s a great place to be invisible. You can post an avatar and hide behind a screen name and no one while know who you are.
On Squidoo, you have to let the world know who you are. If you don’t come across as knowledgeable you will have trouble convincing people that they should believe anything you tell them.
Once all these things are taken care of, you need to use some of the modules which are Web 2.0-enabled.
It might be a real learning curve for you to realize that it is all right to use outbound links on Squidoo. In the old world way, outbound links were no-nos. After all, they took people away from your site.
Squidoo not only encourages outgoing links but rewards you for them.
Long Tail Techniques for Squidoo
You can use long tail techniques with Squidoo. Long tail is hailed as the new economic model for the internet.
The phrase first appeared in 2004 in a Wired magazine article. Amazon and Netflix (both available as Squidoo modules) are examples. The focus is on selling small amounts of hard-to-find items to many customers.
There is an old phrase that comes to mind. “It is a lot easier to get $1 from a million people than it is to get a million dollars from one person.” This is the essence of the long tail.
The long tail phrase is actually a statistical term. It is also known by other names in statistics. A couple of the more popular other names are heavy tails or Pareto tails. Basically it refers to the few people who tail off from a larger population.
Here’s an example. You go to Amazon and see a best selling book. There is a link to similar books and you follow that link. The linked book has further links. You keep wandering along the trail following the path deeper and deeper into Amazon.
The fact is that most of Amazon’s sales comes from the books outside the top 130,000 titles. What this means is that more people want the harder to find books than want the tops sellers.
Part of this is because in most places, it is just not possible to get these titles. But in Amazon, these books are available and the long tail can leave the crowd and follow the trail of rarer books.
For you on Squidoo, what you need to do is offer the information that is off the beaten path. Find a dozen or so long tail keywords and build a Squidoo lens for each long tail keyword or create a lens with 2 or 3 long tails.
You have to do a little search to see what people are actually searching for so you can answer their questions. This will make you popular because these items and this information is hard to find.
A Squidoo lens can be a one stop shop for all the information available on a topic or it can be used as an entrance point into a smaller world of information.
In the Wired article, Chris Anderson wrote, “If the 20th-century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.”
What this means is that in the world where availablity was an issue, only the best sellers went out to the people. But in the internet world, everything is available so people will reach out for the hard to find.
Because their chances of getting the hard to find in their home towns are slim, they easily turn to the world’s marketplace – the internet – to find the information that they really want.
Anyone can read a bestseller. Only the dedicated shopper can find a rare book. On Squidoo you can benefit from this by doing their searching for them.
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