Squidoo lens creation is very easy, plus it is free. Squidoo gives you a lot of options with modules that can help you create a great page with nice features in very little time. You can bring in Youtube video, display chosen RSS feeds, add links, have a guestbook and more. Additionally, as you build more lenses, you unlock more modules.
For SEO purposes, Squidoo is great because it is a third party site, and one that is pretty well established. The ability to create a lens that will pass some authority to your main site is definitely there, plus you can pick up a lot of referral traffic, especially if your lens becomes popular.
Creating a lens is pretty straightforward. You add content, some pictures, pull in some Youtube videos, add an RSS feed or two and you have a lens. By putting some thought into your lens before building, though, you can increase your return in terms of SEO.
Do some keyword research. I suggest targeting long tail keywords that your main site is not picking up. You don’t want your lens to compete with your site, you want it to compliment your site. When naming your lens, be sure to use your long tail keyword phrase. You also get to choose the URL for your lens, again, use that long tail keyword phrase for this as well.
When creating content, be sure to add pictures in each content module. Without pictures, your lens can look very plain. A great place to get pictures is to search some of the public domain picture sites. When writing, create a lens intro, basically telling everyone what your lens is about. Then create the main content where you go into detail. Try to have at least 400 words or more in your content, and make sure it is meaningful. The better your content, the better your results will be.
Add links in your content using basic html. Don’t add too many links, I like to keep to a maximum of 3 within my content, preferably less. Explore some of the modules available, it is very easy to do. Once you are satisfied, go ahead and publish your lens.
While it is very easy to create a lens, fitting Squidoo marketing into your overall SEO game plan takes a little more planning. There are many ways you can use these lenses for SEO purposes.
One thing we like to do with our Squidoo lens creation is to use it to promote RSS feeds of highly related sites. For example, if you build a red widget page on squidoo, and then pull in the RSS feed from your red widget main site, you will be creating links back to your site. There are many variations on this. If you use a RSS feed aggregator like Xfruits or Feedbite to aggregate your feeds, you can place this one feed in your lens, and it will pull from that RSS feed whenever any of the sites in that aggregated feed is updated. Another way to use the RSS feed on a Squidoo page is to pull an RSS feed from a social bookmarking site you use, say your Delicious account.
If you then go and promote your lens through link building, the lens will gain authority, you will hopefully get referral traffic, and the links from that lens to your main site will increase in value.
There are numerous other ways we use Squidoo in our SEO campaigns, and we will explore some of those in a future post.
