Squidoo Traffic Tricks: (how to get more visitors and a better search engine ranking for your Squidoo lens)

SEO: Not technically a word, but it is almost used as one. It stands for Search Engine Optimization, and in most cases probably means 'ranking in google'. So if I said 'I am improving the SEO on my latest lens' then I am optimizing it for a good ranking in google.

URL: Don't worry about what this stands for. It refers to your link. So if you were the owner of iloveducks.com then your URL would be iloveducks.com. When you are registering a lens you are asked to choose a URL, and this refers to the string that will come after squidoo.com. Like this: squidoo.com/like-this

Squidoo attributes a H2 tag to module titles. This basically means the text is bigger and holds more weight as far as google is concerned because it is a Headline. So put your main keyphrase or words in your module titles. Make them fit nicely, and do it naturally.

Your Primary Tag can be quite powerful.

Short Story: You should add your main keyphrase as your Primary tag!

Full explanation coming soon...

Squidoo Lensrank is a number from 1 (being the best) and upwards (depending on how many lenses there are that day). So lensrank 67 is 'better' than 462,358.

Lensrank is a number that is calculated from lots of different factors. Only Squidoo knows the secret formula. They take visitor numbers in to account, sales made, links clicked on, etc etc.

A *LOT* of people get completely hung up on trying to increase their lensrank. But why?! A higher adsense share won't make you rich, and fretting about your lensrank will not get you any more sales.

You need to concentrate on getting more visitors and sales, not on getting your lensrank higher. Don't take your eyes of the goal. And don't get it backwards, like too many other people.

What would you rather:

a. Rank in the top 3 in Google for *Exploding Puzzle Alarm Clock*.

b. Rank in the top 100 in Google for *Alarm Clock*

...is that your final answer?

If you said b, you lose!

This is for a few reasons:

1. The people searching for *alarm clock* will never see you in the search results.
2. The people searching for *alarm clock* aren't BUYERS. They don't know what they want.
3. The people searching for *Exploding Puzzle Alarm Clock* know EXACTLY what they want.
4. The people searching for *Exploding Puzzle Alarm Clock* will see your link.

Go small, and you will rank well and make sales. Go large and non-specific and you will be doomed to chasing scraps of visitors with their credit cards lodged firmly in their wallets.

Squidoo has both lenses and groups. Two different things. A group looks a lot different to a lens, and has different functions too. When you add a lens to a group a few things happen:

* Your lens gets linked to from the group listings
* Your lens may get featured on the group homepage (ideal)
* And your lens will display a link to the group in your lens sidebar

So it's quite important that you start a group, and it's important that you join some groups too.

The extra links to your lenses will help Google find and rank your lens, and people exploring the group pages may click to read your lens too.

You can't fail. Go for it.

The following 5 reasons were written by Linette. You can see her lenses here:

1. Keep an eye on the competition.

If you start a group in your niche area, you can check out what others are saying about your subject. You will be able to interact with others in your niche, get to know them, and learn more about your subject matter and how to market it.

2. Make your lenses stronger in your topic and promote your lenses.

Putting together a great group page with several lenses on the same topic can help draw in traffic. The traffic to the group page will turn into additional traffic to your lenses.

3. Build a community around your topic.

Gather a group of people promoting the same topic. Get to know other lensmasters who are interested in the same thing you are.

4. Build credibility as the expert in your niche.

Being a group master helps make you the master of your group's topic, and helps build your credibility as the "expert."

5. Creates a quality link back to your lenses.

Google likes Squidoo groups and gives them a high page rank. I have 3 groups with a page rank of 4. There are many group pages with a page rank of 5 or 6. When it's your group, you can feature the lenses of your choice for quality back links to your lenses.

Link to your lens is lots of places

When Google determines where in the search results to rank you (1st or... 100001st!) one of the main factors they take into account is how many links there are pointing to your lens.

When a website links to your lens Google sees that as a 'vote'. There is a website willing to 'vote' for yours by linking to it. There are 2 key parts to this. The first: The more trusted the website linking to your lens is, the more valuable that vote will be.

For example: A link to your lens from the homepage of the BBC will be weighted far more heavily than a link to your lens from your myspace profile. The quality of an 'incoming link' is important.

But there is nothing at all wrong with the myspace profile link. All links help. In fact, the second key part to all this is quantity.

All other things being equal, if you and I both make a lens about the same thing and your lens gets linked to from 100 different places and mine only gets linked to from 10 different places... you win. Google would see your lens as more important than mine. So it would show it higher up the search results.

Quality AND Quantity of the 'incoming links' matter.

So get to work!

Because of the way the page is structured Google scans the tags as one of the first things it sees on the page.

This makes your tags SUPER-IMPORTANT for search engine rankings. So use them effectively.

Effective tagging is something to master.

Make sure you make each tag as specific as you can to the subject of your lens.

The Google ads that are displayed on your lens that earn your lens revenue each month (other than selling products) are targeted to fit your lens topic and they are influenced by the content and also the tags you use.

If you were weird enough to look at the source code which makes up your lens (the code google reads to understand what your page is about) you'll see this:

google_hints = "TAG 1, TAG 2, TAG 3, TAG 4, ETC, ETC";

This means that when Google decides what ads to display on your lens, they look at your tags when making the decision. A whole load of other stuff on your page is taken into account, but the initial hints come from the tags.

This is just useful information. You can't really do anything with this, but it's nice to know :)

I wrote a post in the Squidoo Forum (squidu.com) and it had a whole bunch of replies.

What I Wrote Was This:

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Use PHRASES as tags as well as single words.

Squidoo lenses rank really highly in google, often #1 for non-competitive search terms, and tags help your lens come up for SPECIFIC search terms.

What might a person new to your subject search for? Might they type a QUESTION into google?

For example, someone might type: is rich dad poor dad worth reading? If you had this as a tag on your rich dad door dad book lens then you would probably come up quite high!

Do you have a lens about camera memory cards? Maybe this would be a good tag: what memory cards work with CAMERA WHATEVER. Not everybody is going to search google for that, but those who do will probably find you.

Will anyone in your target audience type a QUESTION into google? What might they type? Think of some examples, and add them as tags!
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To read the replies click this link...

http://www.squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1699

You can always rely on Google to make fantastic things we can't resist.

This time they have made a thing called Google Suggest.

You start typing a search term into the google search box and it shows you other phrases commonly searched for how many search results there are for that term.

It's very cool. It's free, and you don't need to download anything.

It's great for finding out any tag phrases you might have forgotten about and great for seeing, at a glance, how many other web pages you will be up against to rank for that term.

Check it out here:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

When you are registering your lens you will be asked to enter in a load of information like title, tags, category, etc. All of this can be edited as soon as your lens is registered, apart from one thing: your URL. It can never be edited.

Your URL is your lens link.

Like this: www.squidoo.com/this-is-the-url

So you have to make sure you choose it correctly!

Here is your new URL picking rule: If your URL will be more than 1 word long, split it up with hyphens.

Google employee Matt Cutts has said that using hyphens in your URL will provide a little google ranking power, whereas using underscores like_this won't provide any google ranking power.

So if you have a lens URL all_about_ducks, your lens won't rank for all about ducks just because of the URL. You can still rank for that search term, but your URL won't help you out by providing any value.

Whereas if you had chosen all-about-ducks, then your URL choice will help a little bit toward a higher google ranking.

You have to give yourself every help you can get in google, so make sure you use hyphens instead of underscores!

One of the replies to the forum post was lensmaster ChrisRizzo explaining how he uses another Google tool to generate his tags ideas.

Here is his tip:

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Google Suggest is cool and can be useful, but nothing beats the power of the Google Keyword Tool (also known as the sandbox).

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type your main keyword into the Keyword Variations box, and make sure that "Use synonyms" is checked, then hit "Get More Keywords" and there you have it, a huge list of alternatives many of which you may not have heard of. You can sort by how commonly the keywords are searched.
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