Squidoo – Rank on Top Twice! PodcastSquidoo – Rank on Top Twice!
Getting your web site to be top ranked on Google and the other search engines is a complicated task. Particularly, if you are one of many within a given market area.
A little known tool for many main street businesses is an internet portal called Squidoo.
It’s similar in many ways to sites like Facebook, and Myspace in that it allows people to create a web presence easily, but unlike the aforementioned, it unabashedly permits commercialization. That means you can put up sites that advertise your business.
The easiest way to do so is to reuse much of the content you have on your web page now. Just rephrase and reorient it to fit the new medium.
Squidoo calls it’s pages, lens. There are a group of modules that you can create and edit in minutes once you get the hang of their system. There are a lot of interesting things you can do with the various modules. The main thing you want to do is use your Squidoo lens as additional advertising tool for your services and as a funnel to send traffic to your main web site.
The most critical point when setting up your first lens is what you call it.
If you are a butcher in Minneapolis, you want to do some keyword research as to the best term to use for your market. It may be “butcher”, it may be “quality meats”, it may be any number of things. What ever it is, you want your first lens to use the best of the picks and then add the words, “in Minneapolis” or what ever the top geographical term is in your market. Then after you set up a lens, “Quality Meats in Minneapolis” set up another for “Best Brats in Minneapolis.” Since Squidoo is free, there is no reason for you to not set up multiple Lens on your best keyword phrases.
If you do, you will often find that your Squidoo len(s) will get higher ranking than your own web page, even if you have optimized your web sites meta tags geographically, as I do for my clients.
That’s because Squidoo itself has a high PR or page rank in the eyes of Google.
Now what you want to do is include links in your Squidoo Lens to your web site’s home page. This helps raise your web sites ranking in Google’s eyes as well.
It sees Squidoo as an “authority” site and gives more credence to links coming from it.
There is a lot more to internet marketing than just having a web site. That’s what keeps internet marketing consultants like me in business.
While Squidoo is easy to use, like everything, there is a learning curve. Once you master the basic mechanics you also need to learn the strategies to make it work for your particular needs. There are a number of eBooks about Squidoo out there. I publish one called Squidoo Basics. It is a general introduction to Squidoo.
There are other formats beyond Squidoo, like Hub Pages, but Squidoo is probably the best place to start building a broader internet presence. To get started all you need do is open an account at www.Squidoo.com
In due course, you will not only get your web site on the top of the Google Rankings in your home town, you will also have a Squidoo page there as well. When prospects see you listed not once, but twice, in the top of the local listings, they will begin to understand that you are the person to go to locally for home staging services.
And that’s where I intend my clients to be. On top of their local markets.