Improve SEO on Your Squidoo Lens

The purpose of this lens is not to discuss Rebecca's writing style or her squidoo page design. She is great at both of these items and perhaps I should be asking her for some tips on improving mine in those departments.

By visiting her lens you can see she spends time writing and revising the lens and placing the images in places that would appeal to her readers.

I understand many people make lenses simply because they enjoy building spaces online, and if that is you, skip this entire lens. I respect why you use Squidoo and enjoy reading your lenses... Don't change!

If you are new to search engine optimization and want to improve SEO, it's important to concentrate on mastering the skill using only one keyword. If you try to optimize for many keywords, then the "spiders" get a little jumbled and don't know exactly what your site is about.

You will notice that Rebecca has many different words hyperlinked. Since hyperlinking is one of the great ways to improve SEO on a site, she should simply hyperlink her keyword phrase. It is important to note that she did hyper link her main keyword in the intro of the lens. This is a great way of boosting SEO.

I understand that Rebecca likely did this to help boost PR for a few of her other lenses, but it is best to use blogs, other sites with high PR (such as hubpages or EzineArticles) and also Squidoo Groups will help with this.

If you need to learn about keyword optimization you can learn more at Squidoo Newbie.

When using photos throughout your squidoo lens, it is possible to make these photos link to your merchant. If anyone clicks on a photo, they are directly taken to where you want them. =)

Also, Squidoo recommends you name your main photo whatever your keyword is... this should be done with all the photos on the page so that google knows exactly what your site is about. Do not abuse this because if there are too many links, google may mark you as spam, but done throughout the lens really helps.

I simply use photobucket to do this with my images.

Ok, I admit that this has nothing to do with SEO. However, it is a great idea to leave the very bottom of the lens to tell readers what you want them to do next. This could be the "Big Arrow" tool or a list of other websites you want them to visit. A personal favourite of mine is to include other lenses I have created within the same niche or on the same topic.

If the reader didn't click on any links throughout your page, when they get to the bottom you want to keep their eyes on your "stuff".

Rebecca's lens is on organic skin care products so she has created a lens with a lot of information about these items. She has many resources and links to many sites that provide further information on the topic. But this causes a few problems for an affiliate marketer.

1. The bottom line is that you want your visitors to go to the merchant page. By giving them other options, you lose them to other sites. And who wants to lose a customer?

2. You are giving google juice to the other websites... this is not a bad thing if you own those sites, but if you don't, then do not link with them.

3. And of course, as mentioned earlier, a hyperlink is a "head nod" to your keyword. If you have many links leaving your lens without it being the targeted keyword, the spiders go wonky.

When choosing an URL for your Squidoo lens, name the lens what your keyword is. In this case, Rebecca is targeting Mountain Rose Herb. In theory, her lens URL should include those exact words. Rebecca has named her URL http://www.squidoo.com/body-oils so it is not as friendly to the spiders.

Rebecca's lens has a lot of great information on it. In fact, I would call it a wealth of information. My suggestion would be to do some more keyword research and create a couple lenses using different keywords as the focus.

By doing this, you are spreading out your web presence and hopefully attracting a variety of different keyword searchers to your site and improve SEO. Another great benefit of this is that you can lensroll the lenses and connect them so you can keep your visitors on your lenses and hopefully this steers them to the merchant's page as well.