How To Make Your Squidoo Webpages Easier To Find For Long Term Traffic

This is an article written by Bob the Teacher, one of my mentors. Since I’ve written recently about Squidoo and in fact put out a new Squidoo lens just this week http://Squidoo.com/ArticleMarketingHints I thought it appropriate to share. It appears I should have read this article before I named my lens.


How To Make Your Squidoo Webpages Easier To Find For Long Term Traffic
By Bob Jenkins

You may create the best, most useful content on your Squidoo lens, but if no one can find it, it is useless. To increase the chance that your lens will be found, here are several strategies.

Write An Effective And Compelling Lens Title

One of the most important things to do when you first create your lens is to take the time to create an effective and compelling title. You must consider two points of view here: what the search engines see and what your visitors will see.

You need to remember that Squidoo embeds tags around the title that makes it a powerful magnet. So when the search engines index your lens, this is the first thing they look at. If you do your keyword research and use keywords that your audience is using to search for your topic, then you will score better search engine rankings.

Let’s look at two possible titles for a lens..

  • Title 1: All About Beef Jerky – way too general
  • Title 2: The best beef jerky for healthy diets and delicious snacks – very specific with lots of keywords for “long tail” searches.

The point is to use the specific keywords that your audience is using in searches.

You also must keep in mind that your title must create reader interest. If you have a catchy title loaded with appropriate keywords, your readers will be more likely to want to dive right into your lens.

The title you use for your lens will appear at the top of your lens and in the title bar of the browser window. This same title will also appear in the search engine results, too, so they must attract the reader’s eye right away.

Ditto For The Module Titles

While you are working researching keywords for the title, repeat the process for the module titles. Modules are the building blocks for your lens. Almost every module has both a title and subtitle, which you can turn into the Sub headings of your new webpage on Squidoo. For maximum effect, use your power keywords here as well because these phrases are marked with tags and can also influence search results.

Your lens and module titles can be changed at any time. However, the sooner you implement better keywords, the quicker your traffic will increase.

Load Your Lens With Relevant Tags

Another area to consider in making your lens easy to find are your lens tags. In addition to all the titles, you can add up to 40 additional keywords to your lens. So it really pays to do your keyword research.

Each tag can be a single word or a complete phrase. Make sure to select your very best keyword for the primary tag, and then up to 39 other phrases that are likely to attract very targeted traffic.

Okay, But How Do You Find The Keywords In The First Place?

Keyword research is one of the most essential skills in internet marketing, and Squidoo is no exception. Probably the best way to start doing research is using the Google keyword tool, which is supposed to be used with Adwords, but you can use it with Squidoo just as easily.

Simply type in the phrase Google Keyword Tool into Google, and it’s the first result. Once inside the dashboard, simply type in the phrase you believe is the best phrase for your topic and you will quickly see how your phrase compares in search volume and advertiser competition to similar phrases.

Whatever keyword phrases have the best volume/advertiser competition combination are your winners. Use them in your lens and module titles, and again in your tags.

Find Out What’s Popular With The Squidoo Tag Clouds

One of the hidden sources for keyword ideas is the Squidoo tag cloud. You’ll find the link to this at the bottom of every page, labeled as Tag Clouds.

Tag clouds are graphical representations of the most popular and most relevant topics on Squidoo. In the tag cloud the larger sized words indicate a more popular term. If your lens is related to these topics, be sure to include them in your keyword tags so you will be more easily found by Squidoo users.

These tags may also appear sooner in Google search results than your lens. However, by including the tags in your lens, you’re just one more click away for your next customer.

Link To Your Lens Wherever You Can

The final piece of this Squidoo Secret is to post a link to your lens wherever you can. There are many different ways to do this.

Blog Comments

Any time that you post a comment on a blog, be sure to include your lens URL in the comment form. Make sure you include the http:// in order for it to become an active link. You may also want to include a link at the bottom of your comment using a standard HTML linking code. However, be careful with this as some blog owners will flag your comment as spam if they believe your post is simply being used to get a link.

The rule of thumb for any blog comment is to make sure you are adding productively to the conversation. Leaving great comments will result in better traffic.

Forum Posts

Be sure to follow the rules of the site that you are posting to. Some forums for example will not let you include a website address in your post. Also make sure that your post is relevant and adds to the quality of the forum thread.

For example, don’t just reply to a post with “Great Post!”, and then include your link. Express why it is such a great post. If you disagree with the author, tell why. When you take the time to add to the content, it will pay off with increased traffic to your lens.

The best place to link from a forum is in your signature. This is often changed in a tab labeled Settings or Profile. Be sure to make your link active by using the correct forum BB code.

Email Signatures

One often overlooked method of increasing traffic to a website is using an email signature. By including your squidoo lens URL and a short description on every piece of email you send out, you can increase traffic to your lens.

Use this in your personal and business emails as well as at the bottom of your autoresponder newsletters and broadcasts.

Your Blog and Websites

If you have any existing websites be sure to include your lens. If you have a blog, announce your new lens and discuss its purpose. Then encourage your readers to look at it and provide you feedback on a lens guestbook. Use the sidebar of your blog to provide an easy to find link to your lens for every new visitor.

Making Your Lens Easy To Find Will Pay Off With Long Term Traffic

It may seem like a lot of work up-front to do all of the keyword research. But it will pay off dividends in traffic. By using relevant titles and key word tags, along with consistent linking strategies, it will be easier for your audience to find your lens. Thus you will begin to gather your tribe and be well on you way to being a great Squidoo lensmaster.

Bob Jenkins is a globally recognized Web 2.0 expert, specializing in the use of blogs and Squidoo for marketing.
Bob provides comprehensive Squidoo tutorials in video, audio, and print format at http://www.SquidooSecrets.com.

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Article Marketing – A Backbone Strategy

You want your web page to be ranked at the top of the search engines when your customer types in keywords relevant to your business.

While you can buy your way to the top using pay per click advertising, it’s more productive and quite feasible for you to move to the top of the various search engines if you apply the optimization tactics we’ve discussed over the past month.

Now some keywords will be harder than others, but if you are serving a local market, and use geographical keywords as I have suggested, it should be possible for most of you to get to the first page, if not the top listing.

The way to cement yourself into that top ranking is via back links, and while there are lots of ways to generate backlinks, the most powerful over the long haul is article marketing.

While you and I use the internet to market goods and services, most people use it to find information. And Google in particular caters to this need for information above your and my crass mercantile interests.  Article marketing helps us turn that on its ear.

A good article not only provides critical back links that will help boost us in the search engine results, it brands us as a resource to those who look for information online.  It conveys to us “expert” status and good will. This credibility will serve us well when we finally get the customers attention at a buying point.

Our first step is to cover a topic well in the form of multiple articles exploring all aspects of our product line.  Then we post these to the article directories where they can be picked up by bloggers and ezine editors.  While they are getting something free from us, when they republish our articles they are actually trolling for customers for us.

So while we advocate article marketing for the immense value we can derive from the back links it can generate, we also love the traffic it sends us. And not only do we get traffic, we get educated targeted traffic from prospective customers who already know that they want what we have.

That makes our sales job a breeze.

The value of article marketing is so great, that I have decided to start a new blog dedicated to the topic. It is called Article Marketing Hint. I hope you will take a moment to visit it and consider subscribing to the RSS Feed.

I already have a number of posts up, and have several more planned. I will of course discuss the topic here from time to time as well.  The url is http://ArticleMarketingHint.com

Resell Rights Game Plan

What’s the fastest way to get a new product created?

Whats the fastest way to write a set of auto responder messages to people who opt into your list?

What’s the fastest way to find products you can offer as bonuses to help sell your new product?

What’s the fastest way to do research on a niche?

If you have money to invest the answer may well be to hire it all out. If that’s you situation, I have some good ideas and resources for you. Drop me an email.

But if you are the do it your-selfer, building your internet fortune from the bottom up shoe string style, the answer is PLR and/or Resell Rights Products.

And right now, today is the day you need to take action to grab a hold of the best deal in PLR and Resale products anywhere.

I’ve written before about Resell Rights Fortune, and am writing again today for two reasons. One the price is going up on the monthly membership tomorrow.  That’s actually the reason why I am writing today.

The second reason is that there really is an advantage to this program that you cannot get anywhere else. And it’s an advantage you can use to speed up your progress online.

That’s the ability to search for the products you need. You can search by topic, keyword and various rights and other attributes such as whether or not they offer a sales page, have graphics you can use, etc.

Sunday, I spent about an hour and identified not just one but five products related to a niche I want to master.

It’s an area I know a lot about already, but am not what I would call an expert. But I was able to identify within the group a resell product I could offer for resale with pride, and two additional resell rights products I could offer as bonuses to enhance the attractiveness of my first product.

I was also able to find some PLR material. Frankly one of which was pretty lame but did make a couple of good points worth passing on. Another was well written and more importantly had a good table of contents.

My plan is to take that table of contents and use them as themes for a sequence of blog posts and eventually articles to post on article directories. The blog posts will be on a new url I have acquired.  I will read all my new material and then write the actual blog posts in my own words. The PLR material and even the Resell Rights material will amplify my existing knowledge, so I will be able to write with authority.

Finally, I will use all the same material, to create a series of follow-up auto responder messages. Again using ideas gathered from all of the above.

The PLR and Resell rights material provides the research, and organizational ideas. It provides the background and fills in gaps in my own knowledge, and allows me to write faster, and offer a far more valuable product covering my niche. When I add in my own unique knowledge I add my own personal statement and build value as well.

It should be possible for me to finish this project within a week. At the end of which I will have a new blog, a giveaway product I can use to get optins and build my lists, a product with some nice bonuses I can sell and monetize the whole thing and a valuable series of emails I can send to those who opt-in.

I will have used 5 of the 30 downloads (I signed up for the 30 for $27 option)  So I will be able to do the same thing next week in another niche.

This is the workperson method. It will require work, but it is the sure way to make real progress. And at the end of the week I will actually be an expert in the niche. You see when you take the time to teach a niche to others in this manner, you actually learn the material more deeply than if you just read it.

For $27 a month, if you are willing to work, this plan of attack will get you where you want to go. The introductory pricing ends tomorrow, so take my advice and join Resell Rights Fortune today.

Resell Rights Fortune

Twitter Tips and more

While I have been focused on search engine optimization in terms of my postings the last few weeks, I have continued to expand my use and understanding of Twitter, the current rage.

I have also published a new report on on how to build your business with social networking. Its free and you can get a copy at Start Social Networking My opt in page still needs some work, I messed up the graphics while tweaking it.  I hope to get that fixed soon, but don’t let that get in your way. I think its a good overview of the field.

Some people refer to it as web 2.0 and other names, but what ever you call it, it is critical for small business people who are using the web to get as grounded as possible in the various venues.

That doesn’t mean you have to be active in each, but understand that their are distinct markets and populations that use each of the various services.

Perhaps the biggest at least intially was MySpace. And while some think of MySpace as a place for teeny boppers, there are millions of folk well past their teens active there. And while you can get banned from MySpace for inappropriate advertising, it is still very possible to advertise and build your business pressence with MySpace. To learn more go to My Space Profit Strategies.

It’s twitter that is today catching the bulk of the buzz.  As I’ve written before, I initially thought Twitter was a joke. That changed after I started listening to some of Doug Champigny’s ideas on the topic.

I jumped in an slowly grew a list, and following Doug’s lead began to get quite a few followers.  I was hooked. When I passed five hundred and then approached a thousand followers I became determined to build as big a list as possible. Then I got Doug’s most recent and authoritative report called Advanced Twitter Marketing.  (ATM)

It blew me away.  And made me go back to start. I was building a big list alright, but an undifferentiated list.  Now I have 8 twitter accounts. I just started a new one today.  Thanks to ATM, I now know not only how to grow a list, but how to target it properly.

While Doug was doing the research for ATM he did a case study, which he has released documenting his experiment in growing a targeted list from scratch.  The Case Study is available free and I encourage you to grab a copy.

Now these ATM tips and the how to’s are critical to developing a strategic use of twitter, but they also require a bit more work as well. Anyone can toss out affiliate marketing links to a list of Twitter followers.  Most people don’t really seem to mind, they just ignore them.

If you want to be successful with Twitter, you need to offer more.  And that takes time.  Thankfully, master Blogger Mike Paetzold stepped into the breach with his Twitter Time Saver report and accompanying videos.

Using the ideas in Twitter Time Saver, I learned how to use google news to link to Google Reader and in turn Friend Feeder to automatically pass selected relevant news articles to my various lists. I still need to review and select which articles to post, but the system saves a ton of time.  I posted to 7 or my eight accounts this morning in less than half an hour. (1 didn’t have anything worth posting so I didn’t)

This has helped establish me as an authority with my followers in these niches.  This will be critical to my long term success and yours as well.

By the way, as I mentioned Mike is a Blogging expert, and his most recent product is worth mentioning as well. Every business would be well advised to have a wordpress blog.  That’s easy for me to say, but it took me a while to actually get my first blog up.  Mostly, because there are so many options available. While most are free, the wide variety of themes, plug ins and settings are mind boggling.

Mikes new product called, Word Press Made Easy is actually a re-release of a prior product updated to include the most recent changes that were instituted by Word Press a couple of days ago.  Mike is a beta tester for them, so he was able to produce a completely up to date product. Even if your technical skills are limited to the ability to do email, Mikes Word Press Made Easy will show you how to get your Blog up and running in about an hour. Not only will it be running, but you will have your plug ins selected and the settings set the same way a Master blogger does.

If you read this today Saturday, and hurry, you can still get the $20 off introductory pricing through midnight EDT tonight. If you read this later, you should still pick it up, if you need help getting your blog optimized.

I’ve been following Mike’s blogs for some time now, and incorporating his suggestions in all my blogs. He knows his stuff.

Well, I have rattled on long enough today.  The grass needs cutting and we are having a sunny Saturday for a change, so its time to get up from the computer. Hope you have a great weekend.

Beyond Squidoo: Get Support from HubPages

Get More Link Juice Via Hub Pages

In my last posting, I spent some time describing Squidoo.com and how useful it can be as a source of quality backlinks to your site.

Squidoo offers you the opportunity to create your own backlinks that you can custom design. By that I am referring to your ability to use anchor text that uses precisely the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and the ability to direct that link to a specific page on your web site.

Since Squidoo is free to use, there is no reason why you can’t create multiple Lens, and add additional links to your site.  From a search engine optimization standpoint it makes sense to have multiple short Lens rather than one long comprehensive one. So if a home stager wants to create a lens on staging a bedroom and another on staging a living room and a third on outdoor landscaping you now have three sources from which you can send links back to your web site. Within each lens you want to include a couple anchor text links to various pages on your site.

The power of Squidoo comes from it’s internal grouping system. Once you have created your lens, you want to join your lens to every relevant group you can.  If you are a potter, you will want to sign up your lens with all the various pottery groups, as well as art and crafts groups and any others that make sense.

The search engines see Squidoo as a large web site with many different topics. Normally this would be negative as it’s not focused and many lens are not specifically relevant. However since your lens is connected and linked to internally via your group memberships and also by  Squidoo’s own internal tagging system you are seen as part of all the groups you are associated with.   The strength of your  individual link is a product of all these relevant association within Squidoo.  To learn more about the internal linking and groups within Squidoo get a copy of Squidoo Basics.

A similar venue like Squidoo is the Hub Pages site. Go the www.hubpages.com. Set up an account there, and jump right in.  The set up is different but similar to Squidoo. You will need to create a title of 120 characters or less, which becomes part of your url. Just as with Squidoo, you want it to consist of the keywords you want your own web site to rank for. So if you are following my advice on using geographical keywords you may want to name your site, CincinattiDryCleaning if you are a dry cleaner in Cincinatti.

Just like Squidoo, you want to create anchor texts in your hub pages. You can use much of the same material in your hub pages that you did on your Squidoo pages, but you want to rework it into a different format so it is distinctly different than the way it appears on Squidoo or anywhere else. Make it unique.

Now while you will be including links to various pages on your web site, you also want to create some links from your Hub pages to your Squidoo pages. That’s why we talked about Squidoo first.

Remember last week when we talked about “link juice.” Hub pages have a little less link juice than Squidoo. But they are still a highly ranked site, just not quite a big. Your link from Hub pages pours link juice into your Squidoo lens. This link juice accumulates there and is passed via your Squidoo lens to where it links, ie. your web site.

It is important that you maintain the one way nature of this linking. As we also discussed last week, if you reciprocate links the link juice cancels each other out.  So for my purposes, I always link from my Hub Pages to my Squidoo pages and never the reverse. Since I have many different niches this rule keeps me out of trouble.

Which one you use to link to the other is less important, than that you make sure to keep the one way relationship alive. And please remember that means you cannot link from your web site to your Hub pages as this would create a circle and negate the benefit of all the links.

Next time I will begin to discuss why article marketing is so powerful.

—–

Two additional tidbits. I have had a lot of projects building up lately thus the delay in getting this post out. I am still doing my analysis of peoples web sites. But am now restricting myself to just four a week. These are very useful to people and I want to maintain my hands on service to as many people as I can. To get details go to http://cli.gs/7gH1Zr

In addition to maintaining your web site and getting it set up for search engines, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself is to blog from your own wordpress blog. WordPress blogs are easy to use and free, but can be very bewildering because there are so many options in terms of themes, plug ins, widgets and settings. I have learned a lot about blogging from Mike Paetzold who is a master blogger. He just released a new “How to” eBook and video series Tuesday night and is offering $20 off until sometime Saturday.  It’s called Word Press Made Easy and is a “must have” in my opinion. He walks you through all the plug ins and settings he uses on his plethora of blog sites. If you are going to blog, and you should, it is a good idea to copy a master blogger, until you learn enough on your own to make specific variations. With his help you can have your blog up and running and or re-tuned in about an hour.  Well worth it, I promise you. http://cli.gs/mv5Whd

Squidoo – Who ever came up with this name?

Getting to the Top of the Search Engines XI

Squidoo – Who ever came up with this name?

Building Backlinks on Squidoo

We have established that to advance up the search engines your site needs to be set up properly in terms of on page factors, and also needs to get Back Links from other sites to boost your credibility. Ideally these backlinks should be in the form of anchor texts that highlight the specific keyword you want your page to rank for. For most locally based businesses, it also makes sense to have these keywords and anchor texts include your specific geography such as Home Staging Atlanta or Minneapolis Best Meat Market, etc.

One point I should have made already and didn’t is that these back links need to be one way backlinks. I’ve used the term “Link Juice” before. Imagine that a web site by linking to you is passing on to you some of their Link Juice. If they are a high value web site the back link may be a gallon jugs worth, if it’s a lower ranked site you might just get a pint. That’s if the link is one way to your site from theirs. If you return the favor, you have a hole in your bucket, dear Liza. The Link Juice leaks right back to where it came from. Now if you have a higher ranking than the person linking to you, you may actually loose juice in the process.

At one time it was all the rage to build reciprocal linking arrangements, and one of our readers reported just that after my last post. Unfortunately these are no longer wise moves in terms of search engine ranking. That said, they may still make sense if they send traffic and business from one market to another as part of a referral system. If that’s the case, you may well want to keep them even if they cost some “juice.” But don’t build reciprocal relationships hoping they will help out your search engine ranking. They won’t.

Nor can you set up a circle, where A links to B and B links to C and C in turn links to A. Such circles are readily detected by the search bots, even when inadvertent. So pals we may be, but mutual admiration societies are not the way to get ahead on the search engines.

So how do we get these one way links? There are a lot of ways actually. I mentioned a few to you last time and today we will take a closer look at one of my favorites, Squidoo.

Squidoo is one of many so called Web 2.0 sites, which merely means it is part of the recent wave of sites that allow visitors to interact with the site rather than just read it like a static web page.

There are four primary things I like about Squidoo. First it’s Free. Second, it allows you to put blatantly self promoting commercial messages on it. And thirdly, it’s relatively easy to use. A fourth factor is that is has a high page rank of 7, which means that back links from Squidoo to your site send you giant economy size bottles of Link juice, which is very nice indeed.

To get to Squidoo just go to www.squidoo.com. Once there, sign up for an account. It’s free and easy.

Once you have your account, you are going to create your first site, which Squidoo refers to as a lens. Perhaps the most important thing to remember when setting up your first lens is that what you name it is critical.

For my Minneapolis Meat Market, I want to name the Lens “Minneapolis Meat Market” – if that is the phrase that I want to rank for on the search engines. Now every lens on Squidoo needs to have a different name, so your favorite term may already be taken. If that is the case try adding hyphens between words, or an extra relevant word before or after your desired name.

Some times it is easier getting your Squidoo lens ranked high in the search engines than your main web site due to Squidoo’s high page rank and its tens of thousands of pages, many of which are new every day. The search engines are crawling all over Squidoo constantly, and they will find your new lens very soon after you publish it.

Once you have created your title, you need to fill in the introduction module. Here you want to repeat your keyword/title in anchor text with a link to the page on your web site you want to drive traffic to. So if you are Shar Sitter, one of my Home Staging Clients you may introduce your lens as: “Rooms with Style is a Minneapolis St Paul area Home Staging firm specializing is serving the South Metro Area etc etc…”

If you did a good job creating your web site’s meta tag description, you may want to use that here. It should have your keywords in it, and be a pretty good sales pitch while including the key geography you serve.

By using HTML code to create a link on “Minneapolis St Paul area Home Staging” as I did above, the search engine bots learn that the end link is about Minneapolis and St Paul Home Staging and they have good memories. This is called anchor text and we went over how to set up this HTML code a few messages ago.

This is one of the advantages of Squidoo. Since you are creating the link yourself, you can control the way the link is created. You always want to use anchor text links. The only exception is when you are specifically letting people know what your web site address is and even then, make sure you use anchor text elsewhere in the posting.

If you go to Shar’s site via the link above, you will see it doesn’t go to her home page. It could have, but instead I set it up to link to her page titled “services.” This is called internal linking because it links to an internal page on her web site. Google in particular likes this, and you get a little extra juice for your overall site because of it. Since you have control of the link creation on sites like Squidoo, it makes sense to create these internal links whenever you can.

At any rate, the goal is to use anchor text right away in the introductory portion of your Squidoo lens. That will serve as a powerful back link to your web site. Complete the first module with what other introductory material you feel appropriate.

I’m already at book length for this post. So let me quickly say that the rest of the lens can be simple or complex. It’s up to you. Squidoo uses modules. I tend to use their text modules and fill them with text and pictures. To insert pictures you will need to learn a tiche of HTML code, which is not difficult. You can search on Squidoo for a lens on HTML, there are several good ones. Alternatively, I publish an inexpensive ebook called HTML in Simple Terms for under $10. The advantage of the ebook is that you can print it out and keep it handy by your computer. I find it easier to look things up in print than online.

I also publish an eBook called Squidoo Basics. It costs $17 and will help get you acclimated to Squidoo quickly.

The thing to keep in mind about Squidoo, is that you can publish as many lens as you want. For link building purposes they don’t need to be fancy or even complete. But spend a little time on them and focus on one topic about your business. Create another lens to discusss another aspect. If you serve more than one town, you can be DryCleanersOmaha and OmahaDryCleaners or SouthOmahaDrycleaners. Etc. Each additional link of this sort will help increase your ranking for Omaha Dry Cleaners.

If you are a home stager, you might want to create a lens just for Realtors, and use the Lens as the place you make your special pitch to them. Just be sure to link back to the Realtor page on your main web site.

Once you get the hang of putting up pictures, and I promise you that learning the little bit of HTML code to do that is not difficult, you may want to create a before and after lens for each of your projects.

Just be sure to include back links in each new lens to your web site’s various pages and in no time you will discover than not only is your web site on the top of the search engines, so too will be a number of your Squidoo lens.

When your prospects find you not just on the top, but also number 2, 4, 6,7 & 8 on the listings, they get pre-sold pretty fast that you are the dominant player in your community.

Yes, it will take a little work. You may need to learn a couple new tricks, but with a bit of persistence you can do it.

Next week, we will look at a similar site called Hub pages and maybe a couple of others. If you have questions about today’s post be sure to leave a comment. As I did today, I will incorporate any questions into the next posting.