Using Squidoo To Boost Your Small Business SEO

August 17, 2009

Squidoo is a free site in which users can create single web pages on particular subjects. These web pages are called lenses. In February this year there were over 900,000 hand built lenses on a variety of different subjects – so no matter what your small business is, there is space for you to create your lens and to promote the knowledge you have of your product and/or services.

The joy of Squidoo is that it’s so easy to build a lens; however, this blog post isn’t about the technicalities of how to build a lens – it’s so very simple to do that and Squidoo provides more than enough information on this itself. This blog post is about why, as a small business, you should build lenses on Squidoo and how to use your Squidoo lenses as part of your small business SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy.

Squidoo lenses are a fantastic way of boosting your own sites ranking in the search engines. Why? Because they are owned and managed by you. You provide the content, and decide how the lens is managed. And it’s you that provides the links from that lens to your site. Squidoo lenses are a great way of generating good quality, deep inbound links to your sites. With SEO, the more inbound links you have, the higher Google will rank your website for your determined keywords. However, as with most things, quality rules over quality, and this is where Squidoo fits nicely. By building a high quality lens (with lots of fresh, unique content, well optimised – see tips below), you will be able to build up its PageRank. You also have full control over the links that point from your lens to your site, and the anchor text that is used in each link. These are all important factors when it comes to determining link quality. A link, with good anchor text, from a reputable site, is worth far more than a link from a simple directory.

So how do you go about building and optimising a high quality Squidoo lens? Here, in no particular order, are my tips:

• Make sure the URL is relative to your lens subject – such as Squidoo.com/building-squidoo-len-for-SEO.html  (hyphens are better).
• Ensure that the module title and subtitles contain keywords – these are the Squidoo version of h1 and h2 headers.
• Ensure any images have keywords in their names and in their alt tags.
• Make sure there is a 3-5% keyword density in the body copy (but no more than 5% as this will start to look spammy).
• If applicable, install the Google Blog Search module into the lens – this is a really SEO friendly module as it contains live links that search engines can read.  When installing, I’d normally put it at the bottom of your lens and make sure you use the keywords you are targeting in the box provided.
• Ensure that the body copy has links to many different pages within your site. So not only the homepage, but other pages (known as deep links). Do this by typing: <a href=”www.URL.com”> text </a> ,  into the body copy.
  • But no more than nine links to each domain, i.e only nine links to www.yoursite.com. This doesn’t mean you can only have nine links full stop, but only nine to each domain. If you use more than nine, there is a very good chance that Squidoo will ban your lens.
  • If you have more than one lens, you can link to each of your other lenses too.
• You can make many different lenses then have a directory lens that links to all of them.
• Large lenses are better. However it’s not a good idea to just cut and paste material from your website. You can take copy from the site, but I recommend that you spend a bit of time amending it – otherwise Google will view it as duplicate.
• The larger the lens and the better content, the higher PageRank you’ll get. Which means that the quality of the inbound links you get from it are better. Which will help the ranking of your main site.
• Make sure you tag your lens with the appropriate keywords.
• In the Lens Settings, ensure you opt out of text link ads (doesn’t include Google ads) and the banner ads. You don’t want other companies (possibly competitors) advertising on your business lens.
• Also make sure you Digg, Stumble, Delicious etc all your lens when you make them (you’ll find on the  the left side bar buttons to make this simple).
• Also promote your lenses via Twitter – you want to get people to visit the lens – this will help boost its popularity.
• Make sure you go back regularly and update your lenses. Squidoo (like search engines) favours lenses that are fresh and up to date (as opposed to ones that have been built, then left untouched). So even if it’s to remove or add a sentence or two, make sure you do something to your lenses on a regular basis to keep it fresh.

Once you’ve built your lenses, keep an eye on them, the page rank they have, and their rating in Squidoo. Promote them when you can via the social media outlets you use and you may soon find that you’ll be getting referrals to your small business website from Squidoo, as well as improved rankings in the search engines.

If you want help or advice on building Squidoo lenses, or on SEO for your small business website, please get in touch with us here at SMEketing.

Filed under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media Marketing

Tags: (SEO), search engine optimisation, Small business, Small Business Marketing, SME, Squidoo, website marketing, Website ranking