Post Publish SEO Tips for Squidoo

1.Pushing that magic Publish button doesn't get your lens in Google. It doesn't yank Google, or any other search engine, over to your page and say "add this". Google bots will eventually crawl the page trying to figure out where you belong, but then may toy around with it for awhile. I can usually get a lens indexed within 24 hours now, but Google will still play with the lens for a few weeks before it seems to settle. In those two weeks, I'll be up, down, in and out of Google. Don't freak out. Internet Marketing is not an overnight venture. Publishing is just a rung on the ladder.

This is why, when you do publish, Squidoo provides you a few announcement tools to help get the lens going. USE THOSE TOOLS:

Ping your lens.
Tweet your lens.
Send a Squidcast.
Share your lens on Facebook.

2.If you already have published lenses about a relevant topic, link your new lens to your older lenses and link your older lenses to your new lens. Remember NICHES? Linking these lenses helps confirm the topic for Google and leaves search engines a trail of breadcrumbs to help find your lens. It can also lead visitors to your lenses more quickly than waiting for your lens to be indexed as visitors from your older lenses may pop on over to the new lens.

Link these lenses together using the Featured Lens Module, the Discovery tool in the Intro module, and Lensroll. Yes, you can lensroll your own lenses to each other but make sure the topics are related or it could actually harm your rank in Google.

3.Knock on Google's door and Yahoo's door by submitting the URL for a new lens directly to Google. It may not help you get the bots to your lens any faster but it doesn't hurt to do this for a new lens.

Submit URL to Google

Submit URL to Yahoo

4.There's a little routine I try to follow after I publish a lens. I haven't been as consistent as I should have been, but after each new lens:

1. Submit the lens in an appropriate thread in SquidU. I love the Potential Giant and Potential 100 Club threads because posting your own lens is acceptable. Otherwise, you might use the Critique Me section of the forum. You're posting as much for the back link as you are for the feedback or attention to the lens. SquidU comments are indexed by Google fairly quickly.

2. Post your lens in any Ning or other Squidoo-related forum to which you belong. (And by all means - remember to add them to team plexos!!!!)

3. I try to keep a rotation of five lenses attached to my SquidU forum and I rotate them, adding the most recent len to the end and removing the one that's been there longest, in order to give each lens some additional back links from the forum. You want back links from a variety of domains so don't count on using just one forum to promote your lens.

Don't be viewed as a spammer. Don't create multiple threads about your one lens hoping everyone will be excited about it. Don't post comments that basically have no value other than to point to your lens unless that's specifically the purpose of a particular thread. It's important to be a part of the community and not just a "user".

7.When I first joined Squidoo, I couldn't figure out why everyone also had a blog. It suddenly clicked one day when I noticed my own blog had a Google PR of 2. Not overly impressive but my posts were getting indexed quickly and I could add whatever links I wanted in my blog. It's one of the ways that helps me get my own lenses indexed within 24 hours. Each time I publish a lens, I put a link to my lens through my blog, either as a blogroll, in my ongoing list of Squidoo lenses on a separate page, or in a post.

One blogger deserves some special attention here. Lensmaster GrowWear. She writes a blog about OTHER lensmasters' lenses called Squidoo Lens Reviews which provides great coverage to other lensmasters. How selfless is that?

As you build more and more online content in different forms, you start to carve out a piece of the web that you own - in a way. A piece of the web you can put to work for you.

8.Of all the tasks I enjoy the least, it's building back links. At times, I've spent hours searching for one, good, quality back link opportunity. Any free tool I've found that is supposed to help you just gives you a list of yucky (yes, I said yucky) sites to which you can submit a link and I don't want to be connected to yucky sites.

The best methods I've found for back links:

Blog posts of blogs you like, actually read, and are comfortable with. When you leave a comment, you're often asked for your website address. Use your lens URL (don't write a comment with a link to your lens - that just looks spammy) as your website address and write a nice, helpful comment. None of those crap comments I get on my blog that say "Nice post." with their name linking to their sales pitch web page on naked pictures of Hollywood stars. I know those people didn't even read my post and I never accept those comments.

Search Google for topics related to your keyword phrase and the word "blog". For example, if I'm doing a lens on SEO, I might do a Google search for "blog internet marketing" and see if I find posts I like on blogs I think are interesting.

Then there's my little I Spy game. Since I know who is sitting in front of me in Google, I can use Back Link Watch to find out where they got their back links, visit those sites, and see if I can't get a back link of my own.

9.Article sites allow you to submit content and, in most cases, include a link to your lens. It's a nice, free and easy way to get a good, quality back link and more traffic - especially from sites like Ezinearticles. After having researched your content for your lens, it should be easy to come up with a short, quality article - say 350 words - on your content without duplicating what you've already written.

Should be, I say, however it's also easy to be so burnt out on your topic by the end of a lens or a niche that staring at a blank piece of paper just makes you want to scream. If you find yourself doing that, stop. Do something else. You can do the article at any time - it doesn't have to be submitted the day your lens gets published.

The power of an article is that it can give you a great back link for anchor text you choose on a site with a high Google PR while also driving visitors to your lens. Better yet, choose your article title carefully to be keyword rich and you could end up with multiple listings on the first page of Google - your lens, an article or two, a blog post, etc. Do a search in Google for writing games for kids. My Writing Games for Kids lens and my Writing Games article are both on the 1st page of Google for my keyword phrase.

Photo by: nirak / CC BY 2.0

10.Ever published a lens and then watched as that lens sank to the bottom of your dashboard with a nice fat goose egg in your weekly visitor count? Talk about depressing. This is often the reason folks give up with online marketing. No visitors and no idea why not and all that work doing nothing.

Your lens, however, will give you plenty of clues as to why it's not ranking well or getting visitors. Look for clues in the following places:

Is it indexed in Google? Type the entire URL for your lens in Google. If your lens isn't on the page that Google spits back, you're not even indexed in Google. This means no matter what anyone types into Google, your lens is not going to come up. Your first job is to get indexed. If this is the case, and your lens was not just published in the past month, add some new content and ping your lens. Write a blog post about your lens and add a link. If you can't get indexed after getting a few back links, you need to go back and focus on the lens itself. Go to the next step.

Are you really optimized for your keywords? Run your lens URL through the Keyword Density Checker to see if you've truly optimized your lens for your chosen keyword phrase. The keywords in your phrase should show up about 3-6% of the time and be the top words in the keyword list the tool returns. If this is not the case, go back and tweak your lens to show your keyword more often. You can always double check your work by publishing your lens and running it back through the Keyword Density Checker tool again.

What does Google think your lens is about? Plug your own lens URL into the Google Keywords Adwords tool (the website option) and see what Google thinks your page is about. Your keyword phrase should show up in the list.

Double check your search volume research. Go back to the lesson lens on Keyword Tips and double check the search volume and competition for your keywords. Make sure to use the "Exact" setting on the tool.

If you're lens just isn't making it in Google and you're pretty comfortable your lens is topic-focused and optimized for your keyword, then check the competition. Someone is beating you at this phrase. Don't cave and don't give up if you think the page will meet an objective you're trying to accomplish (money, for instance, being a HUGE motivator for us all). This is a "game", so to speak, with rules. It's just your turn to pass or play. The cool thing about this game is you can find your competition.

Type your keyword phrase into Google and see what comes up. Those top 10 listings are your opponents. What do they have that you don't have? Is it something you can get or not? Let's say Amazon, Target, and Walmart all come up before you. You might want to rethink your keywords and start smaller before edging up to the top. But if it's Joe Smith's ehow page, a niche site, a blog, an article, etc, then you can take them on. It's just going to take some more effort on your part. Back links and content.

Page Rank and Link Analyzer Tool - I've only just come across this handy tool for analyzing the competition. Type your keyword or phrase into the search tool and you'll be provided the top 10 listings in Google along with the Page Rank for each. In addition, you can click on the buttons below each of the competing pages to analyze their links. Very cool - also an easy way to lose yourself for a couple of hours.

Lensmaster Cloud9 (Correen) asked a question in her comment that I though many of you might also have so I'm going to share the answer here so it doesn't get buried.

Correen asked:

Exhausted! Don't get me wrong, I LOVE your tips and ideas. It just seems like sooo much to do for one 'tiny little' lens...ergo my rankings :) Any ideas on how to organize all of this on a spreadsheet or Google notebook?

My answer:

Sometimes the work to promote one lens DOES seem overwhelming. Here's what I do to make it easier on me.

1. Don't try to do it all - especially not all at once.

Pick a few steps you can do easily immediately after you publish a lens: Twitter, Squidcast, ping, and Facebook are all quick buttons available right after you publish. Make those a part of every lens publication routine.

Then, in Firefox, I've bookmarked SquidU, my Ning networks, my blog and anything else I've identified as an immediate task in one bookmark file called "Publish a Lens". As soon as I publish a lens, I open all the bookmarks in that file at once in a new window and walk through each tab to hit the other items I've classified as an immediate task.

2. For the non-immediate tasks (ie, weekly or monthly), I keep a list of all my lenses along with their publish date on a blog post in my Ning profile.

Separately, I have a spreadsheet that has the following tabs: Bookmark Sites, RSS Submission Sites, and Forums. Each tab contains the name and web address of a growing list of each of these sites along with my user name and password.

Once every few weeks, I'll go into a few of those sites and add any new lenses since the last date I logged in or visited that site. I make a note of the date of my visit on my spreadsheet and look at my Ning blog post to see which lenses have been added since the last noted date I visited that site. This way, I know that if I haven't been on Tagfoot since July 15th, then any lens I've published since July 15th should be added to Tagfoot.

Every now and then, go in and do a search for your keywords on Google and see which of your own RSS feeds show up close to your lens. Those are the keepers. If you find you're using a particular forum, feed or bookmark site and it's not showing up for you anywhere as a back link in SquidUtils or as a source of traffic in your Dashboard stats, then take that site off of your routine list and find a new one.

Promoting your lenses is a constant work in progress. As Giants and potential Giants, we just have too many lenses to take a week or two to promote each one with every possible tool - although, I hear you can outsource some of this work when you start rolling in dough...I'm not there yet so that's just an idea at the moment. :) Pick a solid handful of promotional tools you can do regularly, build a tracking spreadsheet and stick with your plan. Save the full guns for those lenses you feel passionately about getting to the top more quickly - the ones that have the greatest potential for financial return.

Need help with SEO? Fellow lensmaster, JeffWend, blogs about SEO on his self-titled blog, Jeff Wendland, and offers his professional services to businesses and website owners who need help with their SEO strategies.

One post with SEO tips from Squidoo lensmasters is a helpful summary of the easiest and most effective things you can do to boost your rankings in the search engines. Visit the post at: SEO Tips from Squidoo Lensmasters.

By the way, Jeff has a mind-boggling 550 lenses of his own. Want to learn how to become a success on Squidoo? Study the lenses of those who have paved the way - like Jeff.