Being an active user of Squidoo just can not stay quiet... I joined for SEO reasons and I can see every day lenses (in Squidoo language articles) written by so called SEO experts who took five minutes of their time to create five modules minumum lens with a lot of keywords and no real content.
Sure, it can add a nice link to whatever you want and with some easy tricks your link can stay alive for pretty long time, but this is PR0 link and without some sort of promotion it is worthless. If you want to use the platform for SEO or making money (well, one does not exclude other, right?) you need some time to explore possibilities. This article is just overview from outside and looking from SEO aspect I should add:
- everything on Squidoo is FAST, you can not achieve the same result with blogging in same time, not a chance!
- it is not ultimate content, as one of commenters said, it is very very dynamic, rules are changing from month to month, fresh content on lenses (some are older than four years) is a must, every good lens has interactive modules for commenting, voting etc.
- you get A LOT of support.
Part I: Creating a Squidoo lens. 1. Think of a Squidoo lens like of a blog post. Only a valuable blog post will go viral, attract links and dominate search. What I mean by "valuable"? I mean that it must be interesting to all audiences and, of course, it should be trending. Basically that's why Megan Fox's Tattoos lens ranks way better than Book Care and Repair lens. No one cares about the books when there is Megan Fox around LOL.
Squidoo was a revenue-sharing article-writing site. Articles were called "lenses". In 2010, the site consisted of 1.5 million lenses as of October 2010. On August 15, 2014, founder Seth Godin announced that HubPages had acquired Squidoo. Wikipedia The Truth About Squidoo. What is it Good For? Social Media.
2. Now when you have the idea of a nice blog post to create a lens, it's time for a keyword research. Pick the combination you wish to rank for and name your lens. The name of your lens is reflected in it's URL, which helps in ranking.
3. What you have left is to write a really compelling post and hope that people will like it. There's no difference between creating a quality blog post and a quality lens. Pictures, videos, infographics and any type of nice UGC modules will make your lens more appealing. Don't forget to explore existing lenses relative to your topic to get some ideas.
What's the SEO value here? With the Page Rank of 8, Squidoo is a choice platform to gain high quality relevant links to any pages of your website. I bet many of you would like to have a backlink from a PR5 lens like this one: "Lady Gaga Costumes" (1st in Google for "lady gaga costumes" term).
So basically what pro-lensmasters do is:
- seek for a compelling topic;
- keyword research for some decent longtail phrase to name a lens;
- create a nice lens, which will cover the chosen topic;
- promote it to appear in SERPs;
- make money by redirecting visitors to Amazon & stuff
Squidoo was a revenue-sharing article-writing site. Articles were called "lenses". In 2010, the site consisted of 1.5 million lenses as of October 2010. On August 15, 2014, founder Seth Godin announced that HubPages had acquired Squidoo. Wikipedia The Truth About Squidoo. What is it Good For? Social Media.
- Forum. Participate at Squidoo forum and add your lens to your signature. This will grant you some visits of pro-lensmasters. And as I've previously said - they have a really nice community and will always help you with your questions & issues.
- Directories & Bookmarks. There is a small list of Squidoo specific directories and bookmark systems like Lensroll, Squidom, Squoogle etc. Don't forget to submit your lens there.
RECAP: When I started using Squidoo I thought this would be a holy grail that will grant me some very cool links from high PR pages. But it turned that you need to invest just as much effort to promote a lens as you do for any other website or a blog post. From this perspective I've sorted out 2 ways I can use Squidoo for SEO:
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