Squidoo Tips: Building Web Traffic

1. Stop by SquidoU, Squidoo's discussion forums, and add your link to your signature. Click on "SquidU Forums" > "Join the discussion" > "Login" tab (and log in) > "Profile" tab, and finally, "Personality" to change your signature. Bulletin boards use BBCodes, not HTML to make links, so write your link like this:
[url=http://www.squidoo.com/lensname]Lens title[/url]

You may post post links to your lenses in the following forums, but post only one thread per lens: (1) the "Hi, I'm New!" forum, where you can introduce yourself! (2) The "Critique" forum for feedback/suggestions! (3) the "Lenses We Like" forum.

2. Put links to your best lens (or lensmaster's bio) wherever 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. Post links to your lenses on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tagfoot and Del.ici.ous. Use StumbleUpon or Digg to promote some lenses, but be careful! Too much self-promotion on those sites can get you banned! So Stumble/Digg only your best lenses, or only a couple each month on each site. See below for more detailed tips on social networking -- what to do, what to avoid doing!

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. However, search engines ignore most big link directories -- Squoogle and Lensroll.com are exceptions -- so don't sink too much time into this.

5. Leave thoughtful comments on other people's lenses, favorite or lensroll lenses, 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, respond to their lenses and give good feedback, and reach out to people. Then they'll want to check out what you've done on Squidoo.

6. Create a Lensography or Lensblography. These are indexes to all your lenses. The links will help boost SEO. Unique, useful and/or funny lensographies and lensblographies will attract visitors, but a plain old "here are my lenses" list will bore them. So do what you can to appeal to human readers as well as search engines.

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, 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. Improve/Expand Your Squidoo Knowledge. Browse SquidU's Tricks of the Trade forum for threads on building web traffic. Learn to use 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 is trying to encourage good SEO by having a matching primary tag, page title, URL and lens graphic-- but sometimes it's too picky. Feel free to ignore it.)

10. If you have a passion and/or a niche, start 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. Google seems to index blogs really fast -- it favors fresh, unique, regularly updated content-- so links from blogs can help your lens' search engine standings.

Social networking is very popular on the web as a form of webpage promotion and personal outreach.

Personal outreach is NOT the same thing as search engine optimization, which harnesses the power of search engines to send you web traffic automatically! Most Social Networking sites limit the importance of links posted on them, setting those links "Nofollow" or hiding them altogether from search engines. The bottom line: search engines give little or no credit to links posted on social networks.

Instead, in social networking, you're talking to people, not search engines -- people who have the whole internet to choose from! The more interesting and helpful you are, the more likely they'll be to check out your webpage. Telemarketers, however, don't win followings. Don't just link and run.

Some social media sites are happy to let you self-promote your lenses. 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 on how much you participate in and contribute to each 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 member profiles, and/or a dedicated sub-forum, to cut down on spam. Before posting links on forums, look for forum rules or policies.)
  
  
• Social bookmarking sites include: Tagfoot (which I recommend!), 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, so don't do more than 1-2 a month. StumbleUpon also 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, but again, I find 1-2 Diggs a month (especially if you're Digging other websites as well) will keep you safe. 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.
  
  
• 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.