Squidoo Tips: Building Web Traffic

You'll have to decide how much time to devote to personal outreach, how much to working on your lenses! I suggest more outreach at the beginning, and once you've started to attract notice, concentrate on adding and improving content to keep people coming back.

1. Stop by Squidoo's Lensmaster Lounge, aka SquidU Forums, and add your link to your signature. There's a link to it at the bottom of all Squidoo pages and also the top of Squidoo lenses. Click on "SquidU Forums" > "Join the discussion" > "Login" tab (and log in) > "Profile" tab, and finally, "Personality" to change your signature.

For online discussion forums, you'll need bulletin board codes called BBCodes (HTML is disabled to prevent code catastrophes). Here's the BBCode for links: [url=http://www.squidoo.com/yourlensname]Title of your lens here[/url]

Then introduce yourself and invite people to check out your lens in the "Hi, I'm New!" forum! Or, if you're not new, use the "Critique" forum for feedback/suggestions on a lens-in-progress, or "Lenses We Like" to show off a few of your best lenses. Remember, these are other members like you, working on their lenses too -- they'll check out few links, but they're not gonna spend all day browsing your lenses unless you're Just That Good!

2. Put links to your best lens (or to your lensmaster's bio, an index of ALL your lenses) in places where you've got an online presence: your email signature, your blogs and webpages, and your User Profile in any online communities where you're active.

3. Add your lens to Squidoo groups that fit your topic. If there's no "My Groups" tab on your dashboard, go to Squidoo's Explore Groups page. Or if you've already got "My Groups," click that tab, then "Join a group" to start searching.
NOTE: Due to abuses by a few twits, Squidoo holds your lens as a "Work in Progress" for a day or two until it's had time to check that you have at least 3 real content modules besides the intro and guestbook. Once your lens has a green checkmark in your dashboard, you can add it to groups.

4. Submit your lens to Lensroll and Squoogle, and perhaps to other good Squidoo Lens directories. There are actually a TON of "link directories" which feature links you submit, but I think most link directories are a waste of time. I'll explain why below.

5. Leave comments on other people's lenses, favorite or lensroll them, and they may follow the trail back to your profile! But "Nice lens, check out mine >link<" in a guestbook is annoying and doesn't work -- all that says is you don't care about their their lens and just want visitors to yours! Instead, be genuine, respond to and give good feedback, and reach out to people.

6. Improve Your Lens Using Squidoo Tools like the "Health" and "Stats" tabs at the top of your Lensmaster Workshop and Squidaholic. I also recommend and use the following tools created by other Squidoo members: Squidutils, Squidoo Dashboard Extension. (Note: The "Health" tool gives good tips, but stupid feedback. If your primary tag, page title, URL and lens graphic all have the same keywords and it doesn't believe you, thumb your nose at it and move on.)

7. Check out winning lenses on Lens of the Day and see what they've done to make their lenses appealing. Learn from the winners, and improve your lens using similar techniques! Submit YOUR lens to Lens of the Day once you've made a lens of similar quality. Competition is tough, but if your lens is selected, the traffic (and lensrank) boost is great.

8. Update your lenses and use Squidcasts! Webpages with regular updates and new content attract search engine -- and reader! -- attention. Once you've got fans or your lens has been favorited, you can send out Squidcasts to tell fans when you've made new lenses or updated old ones. Go to your dashboard and run your cursor over the lens' name, then pick "Cast".

9. Browse SquidU's Tricks of the Trade forum for suggestions by Squidoo members. I've learned so much about how to Squidoo here, particularly from the "Crash Course in Squidoo" thread at the top of the forum.

10. If you have a passion and/or a niche, consider a blog. People aren't likely to follow a blog that's simply advertising your latest Squidoo lenses, unless you make really exceptional ones. But if, for example, you have a great blog about, "Horse Hockey: The Adventures of a Horse Owner," then you can include links to your horse-related lenses.

"But wait a minute!" some of you will say. "What about Facebook? MySpace? StumbleUpon? Digg?" Good question! Social networking is a powerful form of personal outreach. However, it's such a big topic that I've moved it to its own section below.

Before I discuss Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, StumbleUpon, and social media networking, let me explain Personal Outreach in a little more depth and explain why I use that term instead of the jargonese "social networking".

Personal Outreach means attracting visitors by doing the footwork yourself -- like that guy knocking on your door to tell you he just opened a new store in your neighborhood. Personal outreach is NOT the same thing as search engine optimization, trying to get the attention of search engines so they'll send you traffic automatically! I'll talk more about Search Engine Optimization in Part III.

In personal outreach, the goal is to attract visitors to your website by placing appealing links where they'll get seen. Remember, you're selling yourself: the more interesting and helpful you are, the more you'll build a following, who will look for more of your work! Telemarketers, however, don't usually win followings. You have to do more than just link and run.

Problem: there are millions of people promoting their websites. So online communities limit how you can advertise, to keep their members from being drowned with online junk mail. If you ignore these rules, you risk getting your account suspended (Hubpages, Digg), or being blocked from submitting more Squidoo URLs (StumbleUpon). Worse, you not only put off people who might have liked your lens if you'd used a more appealing method, but you also damage Squidoo's reputation. The cumulative effect of lensmasters promoting their lenses can build or dampen web traffc and search engine respect for all of us!

Bottom line: Read the FAQs of sites where you're thinking of advertising your lens, follow their guidelines, and use their services as they are meant to be used to reach out to people on the web.

Some of these sites are happy to let you self-promote your lenses, making them a powerful way to reach people. Others restrict or ban link advertisement. Nearly all of them let you put a link in your member profile, which can link to your Squidoo bio (where all your lenses are listed) or your lensography, if you've got one.

The number of visitors you attract through social networking depends strongly on how much you participate in and contribute to the community. Meaningful, good-faith participation leads to clicks on your user profile from community members, where they will see the link to your Squidoo bio or whatever you choose to put there.

In those communities where you're allowed to share links, don't just recommend your own stuff -- web users are cynical about self-advertising. Instead, recommend/review/bookmark lots of other good webpages related to topics your lenses are about, to build up a following that will be interested in your links when you do self-promote.

• Social networking sites include: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, MySpace, blog communities, and online discussion forums. These communities are for making friends and sharing interests. They usually allow you to self-promote as much as you like, since members can choose to follow you or not. (Exception: online discussion forums such as fan forums usually restrict link advertising to signatures, member profiles, and/or a dedicated sub-forum, to cut down on spam. Before posting links on forums, look for an FAQ, rules and guidelines, or policy post telling you where link advertising is permissible.)
  
  
• Social bookmarking sites include: de.licio.us, backflip. These services let you share websites you've bookmarked and tagged (assigning them labels like "baseball" or "twilight"). Other users of these services may search tags or bookmarks of people with similar interests, and may friend and follow you if you pick good sites. So PICK good sites... and scatter a few of your best lenses among your bookmarks.
  
  
• Social recommendation sites include StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and Technorati. Many web traffic experts swear by these services, but there's a problem: they're for recommending good websites, NOT self-promotion, which is usually against their Terms of Service. StumbleUpon will BLOCK you from bookmarking too many Squidoo lenses. However, StumbleUpon lets you write a blog, and you're free to recommend your own lenses there. There's also a cheap SU advertising service. Squidoo users of Digg have had their accounts suspended for self-promotion. Here's an article, "Exploiting Digg for how to rank better", that may help, although I personally wouldn't try the pay service he mentions.
  
  
• Social media sites include: YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, DeviantArt, and all kinds of places where you can share pictures, videos, or music. I'm also going to throw publish-on-demand services like CafePress and Zazzle in here, because they're like social media, only the primary goal isn't to share but to sell your media. I've used these sites in creative ways to promote my lenses. On YouTube, I did a slideshow of my trip to Greece with a link to my Greece Travel Lens at the end. I use Flickr to host my photos, and include a keyword-rich link back to the lens where each photo is featured -- which is good for search engine juice as well as attracting Flickr users.
  
  
• Tagfoot is a promising, new and friendly social networking/bookmarking site that combines the best aspects of all of the above, allowing you to share pictures and videos as well as bookmarks and your own sites. I like it.
  
  
• Article-submission sites include: Associated Content, Gather, Hubpages, Yahoo Answers, Qassia, wis.dm. These services are for posting informative articles or short answers (or thought-provoking questions) on topics you know well. These sites usually restrict the amount of links you can make to off-site webpages, because they're wanting you to link to webpages that provide information or are relevant to your article. Some, like HubPages, will suspend your account if they think you're using their service for self-promotion. YahooAnswers has reportedly blocked some members from posting links to Squidoo lenses as part of their answers. Other sites, like Qassia, allow you to do both: you can put one "self-promotion" link after each "intel" (short snippet of info), but they also want you to link to the best sites on the web for your topic. Associated Content is fine with Squidoo links, as long as they're relevant to your article's content, and Gather seems to be "anything goes."
  
  TIP: Any time you're allowed to link to Squidoo lenses in articles, be sure to use your keywords, which may be counted by search engines as "relevant links"! I'll explain about choosing your keywords in the third and last part of this guide.

When I first wrote "How to Get Your Lens Found," like most newbies, I believed so-called experts who said getting lots of links to your site is THE way to build web traffic and boost your webpage's standing in search engines. Then I read search engine guru Michael Martinez's Real Advice From Bad SEOs article on why this common wisdom is sheer bunk.

I've also learned that it may take hundreds or thousands of links to get a boost from search engines, depending on niche popularity; that many social media sites hide links from Google with "nofollow" so they won't get penalized for link-spam; and that a lot of link directories have been dropped from Google's consideration. Search engines want to count links from other people saying your webpage is good. They take steps to mitigate the effects of self-promotion and link buying (a huge industry).

Of course, not all links are useless! Google counts links from good, respected websites and from directories like DMOZ, where submitted links are vetted by a quality control staff. But there's no way to know which sites Google respects -- even though link directories always claim their stupendous Pagerank will rub off on you! I can confirm that Squoogle.com is a "respected" link directory: I've had a Squoogle listing show up ahead of the lens itself on Google. I also believe that niche-related directories who pick and choose links to feature, like The Guardian's Egypt for ancient Egypt links, can give you a search engine boost. But I trust Mr. Martinez, who's spent years doing statistical analysis of what impacts search engine standings and what doesn't. I don't think most "free for all" (or pay-to-submit) link directories help with web traffic, and I don't think social networking boosts search engine standings at all.

Why, then, did I keep this part of my old "How to Get Your Lens Found" tutorial, if I no longer believe that social networking techniques help boost your lens in search engines?

Because personal outreach is an alternative strategy to search engine optimization. Search engines are the way to draw traffic from parts of the web you've never heard of. But personal outreach helps you start the traffic flowing before the search engines discover you. If you're good at outreach, you can build a following yourself -- what Seth Godin, founder of Squidoo, calls "tribes." And if you're in a niche that's absolutely flooded the search engines, like weight loss, you may never elbow out all the other weight loss sites from the front of a Google search, but you can build up a following by reaching out to people individually.

See the difference? Both methods have their place.

However, most of us don't have the personal outreach skills of Seth Godin. So consider how much of your time doing personal outreach is well-spent. I advise sinking more effort into search engine optimization, which I will explain in the third and final part of Greekgeek's Squidoo Tips: How to Get Your Lens Found! Also, not to be forgotten: your number one selling point is to have something worth reading. Content is still king!