SquidUp - Become The Top Squid!

The choices you make now will shape your future. You have to look at the bigger picture, you have to look at your competition, and you MUST be willing to work hard and never look back.

Getting your lens on Google and other search engines is easy but getting a good page rank will take a little time and you will have to do research, but it doesn't have to take a long time. I will briefly share a few tips and tools with you that you can use for picking the right keywords for SEO.

First things first, Lets get your lens on Google in less than 24 hours.

• Go to SquidUp and Submit your Lens. The whole process takes likes 30 seconds and your lens is added to the directory. Other visitors and members can then visit your lenses and vote on them. A simple way to get discovered and drive traffic to your Lens.

It is never as easy as it looks, but nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it and believe in yourself. It's a jungle out there, literally. Finding your lens in the search engines is one thing but how do you get to the first page? Beyond this point, you must be willing to work hard, show perseverance and never ever give up!

I wrote this post at the SquidU forum and decided to bring it here in this lens as it may benefit others who don't visit the forums much

Look, if you don't already, I hope that before you begin creating your next lens, you spend a fair amount of time doing research on your target keywords for SEO. I hope you don't just go and start putting in keywords hoping they will work. In order to gain an edge over your competition, you have to research each keyword and see what is the competition for that keyword. Discard high competition keywords immediately. I am going to recommend a few tools that you can use to find the keyword that is going to work for you.

Go to the Google Keywords Tool and research each of your keyword. This tool can tell you what your competition density and the search volume for each keyword. If you are interested in doing some PPC campaigns for exact keywords, you can find out how much each click will cost you for that keyword. Play around with it, soon you will find yourself using it everyday. Just ask yourself, "what will the user search for?" You get the idea, it is a great tool to research your keywords for free.

Here is my favorite tool for checking Backlinks, its called BackLink Watch. Enter any URL and it will tell you the number of backlinks for that page. It will also tell you where they are coming from. Use this information to start building your own backlinks by following your competitors foot steps. Why you need to know this information? Because you want to know who you are going up against. You want to know how many backlinks your competitor site has, so you can target that goal.

Another great little tool is called NicheWatch. Research your specific Niche and your competition. You must know the waters in which you are about to jump, can you swim with the sharks?

Profit by taking your keyword research to a whole new level. KeywordSpy is the single tool that really outperforms everyone. I use it everyday for my PPC campaigns and it is one of the best investment I have ever made. Absolutely wonderful, take a look at their site and you will be able to see the difference.

You can also take a look at the Firefox plugin called SearchStatus. You can easily find the backlinks and other critical information for any site. This tool uses Yahoo Site Explorer for backlink checking.

Last but not least for now, here is a quick test to see what it will take to get to the 1st page of Google Search results.

• Search for your keyword in google. Go to the site that is at the number 1 spot on the 1st page and do the following:
• Using Ctrl-F, search for the keyword on that page e.g. if you are researching "learning scrabble", search for that. This will tell you the Keyword Density. Search engines like Google look at that as well when ranking your page, you should have your primary keyword appear atleast 3 or 4 times on that page. You don't want to put too many of the same keyword on your page because you will be penalized. This is called Keyword Stuffing and Google don't like it.
• find how many backlinks are coming to that page using BackLinkWatch. Write this information down.
• Now, go to the last site on the 1st page of Google search results, and perform the same 2 steps above. Determine its keyword density and backlinks.

Doing this simple test can tell you, what will it take to get to the front page for that keyword and what it will take to get to the top.

I hope use can use this information to your advantage. This is certainly not a perfect formula but it works for me, I hope it works for you as well. Getting to the top is not going to happen overnight unless you go with a PPC campaign. It will take time, dedication and a lot of hard work.

I wish you the best of luck!

I would like to be able to have an External Vote Button where your users can vote right here on your page instead of going to SquidUp but Squidoo does not allow Javascript so I can only offer the very basic at this time. You can download these and insert them wherever you like in your Lens. Point this button to http://squidup.org/submit. You can contact me for the exact code but I am not able to enter it here because it converts it into an image automatically.