Squidoo Tips: How To Get Your Lens #1 On Google

Need help ranking in Google? Lost in the world of SEO? Is your whole plan going down the drown? Let me help. I currently have way too much free time on my hands and im willing to help my fellow lensmasters, do you have a lens that your struggling to get listed highly on Google? Send me a message and I will help you get ranked highly in Google. I am no longer offering SEO help for your personal websites (I am struggling to keep up with demands) and so I am focusing on lensmasters lenses ONLY. Currently I am offering this for free, but this may change in the future, get it while it's FREE!

I am no longer accepting shopping, work at home or drug related lenses. Please also note that if your lens is against the Squidoo Terms of Service, I will not help you and most likely report your lens. Thankyou.

I can't make any guarantee and I WILL NOT DO THE WORK for you, I will simply point you in the right directions and give you personal help as to what your next SEO steps should be. Please read this entire lens before contacting me, I will assume you have already read everything listed on this lens. Also Thankyou!

I will try to respond to you as soon as possible, please be patient, I may be overrun or busy with other matters. Im finding that some emails are going to my junk mail and i may miss these, sorry if i dont reply. As a general rule if i dont at least reply within a week, please email me again.

What are you waiting for? Send me a message

Current Help Status: Not Accepting - Currently Studying For My Final Exams, Please Do Not Email Me, You Will Not Get A Reply. Please Check Back Soon! Sorry.

The great thing about Squidoo is most of the hard work is already done for you! You don't need to fiddle with meta, body, header, title or keyword tags. Squidoo is also crawled by Google regularly, so its likely Google is going to index your lens very quickly.

So congratulations! Chances are your lens is already on Google's search results, you've made the first step to getting your lens ranked number one on Google without even realising it.

To check to see if your lens is listed on Google. Simply do a Google search like so:
site:http://www.squidoo.com/YOURLENS
example: site:http://www.squidoo.com/rank-first-on-google

If your lens doesn't appear on Google yet, don't worry! When you start promoting your lens Google will find it. Depending on how many backlinks you have you can expect Google to crawl your lens every week or so. My top lenses get crawled every 3-4 days.

The first step to getting listed in Google for your chosen keyword is of course to choose it! It should be simple yet not to broad. Try to narrow down exactly what your lens is about, the less keyword competition the better. Below is a very simple example:

Lets say your lens was on Classic Ford Cars

Cars - is a very bad keyword, you'll never rank top for this keyword and even if you do, 90% of people aren't going to want information on classic cars.

Classic Cars - is a slightly better keyword and should definitely be one of your keywords, but not the main one.

Classic Ford Cars - is of course your number one keyword choice. People making this search in Google are after sites exactly like your lens.

You should select between 5-10 keywords (Squidoo refers to them as tags) for your lens. IMPORTANT: DO NOT REPEAT THE SAME WORD MORE THEN 5 TIMES IN YOUR TAGS , this is likely to be picked up by Google as keyword stuffing and they will penalise your lens. Also make sure to avoid the use of commonly used words in your tags as these will be ignored, words like free, how and the. Choose the best keywords for your lens and remember to repeat your primary tag in other tags, as Google only crawls tags listed in the other tags section. Your primary tag is used only for Squidoo.
Selecting good related tags is only part of the challenge, your tags are merely suggestions to Google and its algorithm will decide whether your site fits your chosen keywords.

Wondering if you've done your tags correctly? This handy tool will check them:
Meta Tag Keyword Checker

So you've chosen your keyword but how are you going to get listed for it? Well here is the two easiest ways to get started.

Keyword Density
You start this the second you write your article, Google doesn't only take into account your tags, they take into account the content on your site. If Classic Cars is a keyword that you've chosen, then Google expects to see it in your content! It's important to keep your keywords in mind and use them throughout your lens (that doesn't mean in every sentence! Just make sure they appear several times). A quick way to check your keyword density (if your using Firefox) is to bring up the Find Panel (Ctrl +F). Type in your keyword then click the 'Highlight all' button.

Anchor Text -
Anchor Text is when you post a link to site but give it alternative text, so instead of the link showing the URL it shows texts. This is very important when linking to your site, see the example below:

No Anchor Text:
http://www.squidoo.com/rank-first-on-google
Anchor Text:
Squidoo Tips: How To Get Your Lens #1 On Google

Google takes this into account when it notices links point to your site, the best strategy is to use something related to or even the title of your lens rather then the direct url. So whenever you link to your site through blog comments, forum signatures or even email, use anchor text!

<a href="http://www.squidoo.com/rank-first-on-google">Squidoo Tips: How To Get Your Lens #1 On Google</a>
Becomes:
Squidoo Tips: How To Get Your Lens #1 On Google

A backlink is a link from another website to yours and they form the basis of Google rankings. The more quality backlinks to your site (or lens), the more attention you're going to get from Google. Google's algorithm is based on avoiding spam filled sites, a thousand low quality links will not compete with a handful of high quality ones.

So what do I mean by quality? Well first of all the sites linking to you should be as relevant to your lens as possible, if your sites about games then get links from gaming websites! The second factor in quality is pagerank, pagerank is a number between 1-10 that Google gives to a website, the higher the number the more important a site is to Google. (See the PageRank Section of this lens for more info on PageRank).

A backlink is basically a vote from another site to your site, by linking to you a site is basically telling Google 'Hey check out this site, its great!' The higher the pagerank of a site the more Google is going to pay attention. There are countless ways to get backlinks to your site and getting good quality backlinks is a large focus of ranking highly in Google.

Backlinks form the key of your traffic and search engine ranking, so how do you go about building these backlinks? The most important thing is to try build DoFollow links, NoFollow links don't hurt your rankings and may still bring you traffic, but they are not as helpful in getting a high Google ranking. (See the No/DoFollow Section for more information). There are numerous ways to build backlinks including:

Forums - One of the best and most simplest ways to promote your sites. Sign-up for some forums related to your niche/keyword, place a link to your lens in your signature and build a backlink everytime you make a post. Be sure to keep your posts full of quality and you'll start seeing traffic coming from these forums aswell. This is also a great way to promote multiple lenses, by placing more then one lens in your signature you can build backlinks for numerous lenses at once! Having trouble finding good quality forums? Try the Forum Finder.

Directories - Personally I no longer submit to directories, they are a waste of time. They bring little to no traffic (in most cases none) and are created by people to earn money, they don't care about your site in the slightest (with the exception of a few directories.) To make the most of directories you have to use the paid link options. This makes sure your link gets approved within the same year and you'll get a good link placement. Submitting to a few of the major directories doesn't hurt, but don't waste too much time here.

Articles - Article submission can take alot of time, but it's often well worth it, articles are indexed quickly by google and often rank very highly themselves, giving you a large rank boost since they link directly to your lens. Writing articles can be very easy or hard depending on your lens topic. Don't ever submit the same article to more then one submission site, you must make every article unique which can be time consuming.

-Websites - This is of course other sites linking directly to you, this is usually done through a link exchange with that site. These days google has reduced how effective link exchanges are, but they are still helpful and can bring traffic, if possible, get links to your site without a link exchange.

-Social Media/Social BookMarking - Digg & StumpleUpon are both examples of social media sites, and are one of the newest ways to promote your lens, these sites give good backlinks and its very easy to get your lens on them (usually doesn't require any approval). There are literally thousands out there, so get socialising! There are just way too many to list here or even link to, I will discuss my favourites later on, if you're after regularly updated lists, I suggest joining the forums also listed below.

-Other Blogs/Lens - Getting a link on a related lens is very easy on Squidoo, it's called the discovery tool, so there's little work to be done here. If you have other lenses and/or blogs put your links on them, don't forget to use anchor text! Other ways include featured lenses and groups.

Want to check ALL your backlinks? Backlink Checker

In 2005 Google added the Do/NoFollow attribute to its algorithm in response to blogs getting comment spammed to receive backlinks.

See the official post here: Google Introduces NoFollow

Basically when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links do not receive any rank increase in search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site, its just in place to stop abuse of places that are free to post links.

But how do you know whether a link is DoFollow or NoFollow? Well originally you had to check the page source... but thankfully if you use Firefox, there's a simple plug-in for it, it shows DoFollow links in blue, NoFollow in red and can be turned on/off with a click of a button.
Heres the link: NoDoFollow

PageRank is a number between 1 and 10, its basically how much credit Google gives to a site, the more PageRank a site has, the more important they are to Google. PageRank is a helpful indicator of what sites are going to benefit you more when creating backlinks, thankfully Firefox has another great add-on called Live PageRank , which will list the pagerank for any site you visit.

Most likely the first thing your going to do is wonder what your lenses pagerank is, while its interesting to know, pagerank doesn't effect your search engine ranking and if you go through Google you'll find most top result sites actually have a very low pagerank. Don't get too fussed over your lenses pagerank. Pagerank is simply a tool to see how much voting power a site has in the eyes of Google.

Using the Live PageRank tool allows you to focus your time on building backlinks from sites with a high PageRank. That being said, there is no penalty for getting links on PageRank 0 sites.

Google wants to provide the best quality searches to its customers, Google will penalise sites that have any of the following:

-Paid Links, paid links are not allowed unless they use the 'NoFollow' attribute discussed above.
-To Many Links, Too Quickly, everybody gets excited about promoting thier lens, but don't over do it! If you go crazy and all of a sudden have 100 links to your site within the first hour, Google is going to assume your site is 'spammish' and will ignore most of your links, the best way to build links is slowly everyday and using different techniques.
-Duplicate Content, Google knows what is on the web, if they crawl your site and find content from other sites, kiss your ranking goodbye.
-Links Not Working, usually not a problem with Squdioo, but if your pages aren't linked up correctly, Google isn't very happy.
-Keyword Stuffing, as discussed above keep your tags small and don't repeat words more than necessary.
-Bad Meta/Title/Header/Body tags, Google's spiders require things to be set out correctly, thankfully Squidoo has done this for you.
-Linking To 'Bad Neighbourhoods', be careful about who you link to, remember you are voting for that site in Google's eyes, so avoid linking to bad sites.
-Automated Software, Everyday i get emails from people asking for automated software. DO NOT use software that claims to help your rankings, unless you never want to be seen on Google again.

Worried about something you might be doing? Check out: The Google Webmaster Guidelines

Algorithm: Specific calculations carried out automatically by Google (or other search engines) to assess the relevance, quality, popularity of every web page for the best results.
Anchor Text: The text you click on to follow a hyperlink.
Backlink: A link from another website back to yours.
Indexing: The initial recognition and listing of a new website on a search engine.
Keyword: A word or phrase used to trigger a search engine request.
PageRank: Google's measure of the importance of a particular webpage based on quantity and quality of links pointing towards it.
SEO: Stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which involves adjusting websites to increase the chances of them appearing in keywords relevant to your site.