How to Effectively Use Squidoo

Squidoo is a website designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about.

Squidoo is very useful to drive traffic to your website.  On Squidoo, you can create what they call a "lens" with content of any topic that you wish to share with others.  Within your lens, you can insert URL links pointing them to your website.  

Because of Squidoo?s popularity on search engines, you can use it to drive organic search engine traffic to your website by having unique content and link popularity.

 

Sometimes people might think that by having unique content in your Squidoo lens, it can get ranked easily for multiple long-tail keywords, driving traffic to their websites. 

I am not saying this is not true, but for it to happen it may take you some time to accomplish.  To rank faster for multiple long-tail keywords, what you need to do is to increase the link popularity of your Squidoo lens by getting more back links to it. 

Before touching on the various ways to increase link popularity of your lens, let me explain a little further on why you need to ultimately get your Squidoo lens ranked well for multiple long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are search phrases that people type in search engines that you can't possibly predict.  For example, if your website is selling acne products, one of your main key phrases could be acne treatment. 

However, if your Squidoo lens is optimized for long-tail keywords, your lens will appear higher on search engines when people are searching key phrases like:  how to get rid of acne fast  acne free in 3 days why do I get acne and how can i get rid of it etc.

As you can see, these phrases are extremely long-tail and the searchers may be really desperate for acne cure, which will probably result in affiliate sales for you.  Hope that from this short illustration, you can see the importance of ranking multiple long-tail keywords on search engines.

To get your lens optimized for long-tail keywords, there are basically two very important factors that you need to take note of:

1.  Unique content with the right keyword theme.
2.  Link popularity.

What I mean by unique content with the right keyword theme is to base your content around a theme that you wish to target. 

Let's take the acne industry as an example.  In the acne industry, after I did quick research, I can identify two keyword themes:

The first is how to "get rid of acne or acne treatment," and the other theme is about "getting rid of old acne scars." 

Although both of these themes are about acne, you can see that the need of the people searching for these two solutions are completely different.

To get your lens ranked faster for multiple long-tail keywords, you may want to consider boosting its link popularity.  The general rule of thumb for increasing link popularity is to get back links.

For your Squidoo lens, there are a few ways that you can do it. Personally, I prefer using EzineArticles.com to link back to Squidoo.

This means that I will write articles and submit to EzineArticles.com and point my articles to my Squidoo lens. These will help boost the Lens Rank of my lens and thus bringing more traffic to my website.

I also make use of various social networking and bookmarking platforms to boost my lens popularity.  You can bookmark your lens at Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc., or include links back to your lens on your various social networking profiles like:  Facebook and MySpace.

You can also ping your site by using pinging services from: Pingomatic and Pingoat.

Once you see that you have succesfully built a long-tail squidoo lens, you can duplicate your marketing process and create more Squidoo lens for the niche that you are in.  This will greatly increase your chances of generating more sales.

Article Written By:  Cheow

To access Squidoo:  Click Here