How To Promote Your Squidoo Lens

I hope before you made the lens, you did some keyword research. If not, start now. Use the Google Keyword Tool. There's really no need to spend big bucks on other keyword tools that cost you more than you've made. That's no way to start making money on the internet!

See: Easy Google Adwords Keyword Tool Research For Newbies for fast, easy-to-follow instructions on getting started with keyword research.

Find one main keyword for your lens, and two lesser keywords for it.

If you used my keyword advice (above) you'll be ready to adjust your text so the people you are writing for will be able to find your page.

Make sure your main keyword appears near the top of the page several times, in the title, in headers, and once (at least) near the bottom of the page. Work it into the text in a natural way. If your text doesn't read smoothly - if it looks stilted - you'll be seen as a 'keyword stuffer' and will not be respected by your readers. Writing for the readers, first of all, is the most important thing you can do.

Next, work your lesser keywords into the text two or three times each. This way Google will know what your page is about, and the people who need the information on your page will be able to find it. Do not over-do it. Do not make your writing look unnatural. Natural-looking writing is much more important than keywords. You need to provide helpful and easily-understood valuable information for your readers.

This is something you can work on and tweak each time you update your lens. Try to update at least once weekly. Believe me, this WORKS. I have brought sites up from many pages down in the Google search results, to page one, just by updating often and adjusting my keyword usage to reach for the best results.

Choose tags wisely. You get only forty tags here at Squidoo so you will want to make the best use of them.

When people use the Squidoo search box to find lenses on topics they want to know about, the tags you use may help determine whether or not your lens will appear in search results. So make sure the tags accurately describe your lens so that the people who want your information can find you.

Do not use tags that don't accurately describe the content of your page.

The tags also show up in the keyword meta tag for each page, but it is unknown whether this is used by search engines. Keyword meta tags at one time were used by them, but because keywords were abused by webmasters seeking an unfair advantage, search engines found ways to get needed information elsewhere.

The tags, especially the first one, also determine what other lens links might be displayed on your page in the discovery tool box, if you have that enabled.

To find good tags use the instructions at Easy Google Adwords Keyword Tool Research For Newbies. This will tell you which keywords people are looking for most often.

At SquidUtils there's an important article on How To Pick Your Primary Tags. You will need this information so SquidUtils will include your lens in the SquidUtils Squidoo Directory.

The one most-important thing you can do to promote your site for search engine results is to develop a lot of backlinks. This means that you need a lot of other people's sites linking to you. This used to be easier when people made personal pages with lots of links, or blogs with extensive blogrolls. But now people are choosier about what or who they'll link to, so you need to develop a plan.

I've tried writing personal emails to people owning sites with related content, asking them to exchange links. Sometimes this works.

The value of reciprocal linking has been disputed. See: The Value of Reciprocal Links in SEO.

I've received plenty of requests for links to be placed on my websites. My number one reason for turning link requests down is the problem of unrelated content. For example, on my blog about starting a web design business I received a request from someone with a spammy-looking commercial site about wrist watches. Why would I want that link on my webdesign blog? The answer was no. If it had been from a fellow webdesigner with a site having information on webdesign business practices, I would have jumped at the opportunity to exchange links.

You can also use a myriad of bookmarking and web 2.0 community sites to place links to your work all over the web. This will require a lot of effort from you, but the results can be powerful.

Below, I list many sites that can be used for backlink building. It will take me months to find and review sites, so I'm going to go ahead and publish this page now, and add to the lists often. I know that if you go the extra mile to promote your lenses on the sites I recommend, you'll find your sites will do better in search engines, and more people will learn about and visit your lenses.

If you care about Squidoo, then show it by participating in online Squidoo communities. Start with Squid U - the Squidoo message board. Put links to your lenses in your signature line and then start posting every day.

Make your name one to remember.

Lensroll and Squidom are Squidoo bookmarking and networking sites. You can add your lens links to the sites and people can vote on them.

Thomas C. started a new forum for Squidoo lensmasters to promote their lenses and Cafe Press sites: Rocking the Squid.

Squid Top is a community blogging site for Squidoo lensmasters. More about that in a minute.

Squidoo link directories - make sure all your lenses are listed on these sites: SquidUtils Directory, Isle of Squid, and Squoogle.

Ning communities have become very popular for lensmaster networking. Two popular Ning groups are Squidoo Marketing and Senior Squids, for lensmasters over age fifty.