How to Best use Squidoo for SEO

Squidoo, for those who don’t know, is a user-generated hub of information covering a diverse range of subjects. Content is created and uploaded by the general public to create a highly adaptable, multimedia ‘lens’. The subject of the pages can vary from how-to articles to informational pages on niche topics. Once a page grows in popularity, it can provide a strong link to any target site as well as helping to deliver decent levels of targeted traffic.

The personalisation of each lens and the ability to attract significant volumes of traffic makes it a rich source for external links for SEO purposes. A lens can be self promotional or it can be a source of information, the choice of angle is largely yours. Creating a lens which provides invaluable information to searchers is a good way of increasing the authority of the page, it may even rank well in the search engines. A keyword focused hyperlink can be added to the lens page pointing to a page on your own website.

To create a Squidoo lens, you first need to sign up to the site (it’s free!). You can then select the option to create your own lens. Here are some tips to get you started:

• Add an informative bio about yourself
• Include links on your bio to anything you’d like to promote
• Do a bit of research to see what lenses currently exist for chosen subject
• Think of a catchy and unique title for the lens (subject related)
• Submit lens in relevant category and sub categories

Unique lenses are far more likely to gain recognition and popularity; people may even link to the lens if they feel the information would be useful to someone else.  A good lens can quickly rank for keywords relating to the lens subject, this in turn will make your links pass value and send relevant traffic to your site.

Here are some good pointers to get the most SEO value out of your Squidoo lens:

• Create an individual and catchy lens title
• Customise lens URL to include main keywords
• Make the lens useful and informational rather than self-promotional
• Regularly include main keywords in the lens without keyword stuffing
• Bold keywords in the text
• Include a few anchor links (2-3 max) back to your site
• Add images to break up text
• Add appropriate Alt text to the images (keyword focused)
• Images can also link through to your site
• Follow other people and comment on their lenses, they will hopefully do the same
• Post your lens on the <a href= https://www.squidu.com/ >Squidu forum</a>
• Add links to your other lenses in the lens
• Create a lensography (a lens that lists all the pages you’ve made)
• Add other lenses to your ‘lensroll’ (a list of related lenses)
• Watch the SquidU forum for any competitions (such as Squidoo Jenga) as these can raise awareness of your lens

To summarise, Squidoo is a good way of gaining valuable keyword targeted links for a website. It seems to have fared a lot better than other sites in the recent Google update [see: Google Algorithm update: Quality Content is King], and has a thriving community of writers and those who are looking for good content. Creating unique lenses of valuable content is the best way to build the reputation of a lens and in return offer a great link.

Any comments on Squidoo are more than welcome below and you can also follow me on Twitter @Koozai_Tom

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