Squidoo SEO Tips

SEO applies to your Squidoo lenses in two different ways:

1. The content of your lenses can be optimized to rank it for various search engine keywords.
    
2. Lenses can be used to provide your site with targeted backlinks.

This setup is really a win-win for you.

Your lens gets search rankings and brings in traffic. That traffic can then navigate to Amazon through ads on the lens, to your own site through links on the lens, or even to other lenses of yours (through your profile or as related lenses that you've listed).

Even if your traffic doesn't reach one of your ultimate goals, you still earn a little bit from Squidoo, so it is really hard to view anything as a failure here.

SEO with your lens content itself really works the same way that it does with your website. You simply want to try to pick out a primary keyword phrase to target on each lens that you create, although you can also try to target a couple of secondary phrases within the content itself (just go for one phrase in your title though).

Make your lens content as rich as possible using a variety of media and also plenty of text content. Pictures, videos, lists, outgoing links, social polls, or anything else can be used - whatever works for your target subject.

Since one of the unique things about lenses is the in-depth nature of each page you create, don't be afraid to cover a few related topics in your content as long as it relates to your primary keyword phrase.

When it comes to the SEO benefits for your own website as a result of creating a Squidoo lens, those benefits come through the links that you create on the lenses. You can obviously get direct traffic to your site through those links, but they can also provide you with some SEO benefits as well.

The links that you create on Squidoo will be “nofollow” links these days unfortunately. However, that doesn't mean that you have to completely dismiss the SEO benefits of building those links.

Google wants to see some relational “nofollow” links to your site, so this is one great way to build them and make it appear to be done naturally as long as you are not overusing the links. In fact, Google has been using “nofollow” links more and more for their rankings lately, so they definitely do not ignore these links entirely!

Since the links will not provide you with a major SEO boost to your own site, keep your focus on driving traffic to the lens by optimizing the content to get great search rankings.

Lenses can easily get top ten rankings for decent keyword phrases. Look in the 100-500 monthly search range or possibly higher if you can link together multiple lenses. For example, create 7 lenses all relating to your main website niche, and specify those lenses as the related lenses - this will put links on your lenses back to your other relating lenses. These links are actually NOT “nofollow”, so they can pass search ranking power.