Squidoo for Traffic & Link Building - SEO Tip Week 32
Update October 29, 2007: Well, after a brief few months my first Squidoo pages have acheived PR values of 5 and 4. My Jean Grey Squidoo Lens is a PR5. So as a high PR link building service Squidoo works quite well.
As an search engine optimization consultant I sometimes have a hard time deciding what is the best use of my time. Research, link building, writing or what have you. Well, this week I did more research than usual and found a site that I had heard about, but had yet to fully explore: Squidoo. What is Squidoo? Well, to put it simply, it is a collection of web pages that users can build on any topic, and I mean any topic that you can imagine. And if you can’t find it, you can create a new page on Squidoo yourself. Squidoo says you can do it in under 5 minutes, but you’ll want to take longer to build a respectable page, or “lens” as they call it.
Once you do you can add modules that let you make money from affiliate sales to online stores such as Amazon and Overstock. I don’t know how much of a money making opportunity it is and I would dare say you can’t make a lot of money with Squidoo, but it did give me some ideas on how to use it for SEO purposes. As a business owner and website owner, you can use Squidoo for two important tasks to help your website: link building and visitor traffic.Testing SquidooI decided to test this out and I built two lenses for fun. I like smoothies, so I tried my hand at creating a smoothie drink lens to support my personal smoothie recipe blog. It was simple to build and I followed the advice for getting the word out and then spent the next 4 days investing a few spare moments here and there, adding new content and pulling information from my smoothie recipe blog and now I have a fairly large lens, compared to most. As of today (8/12/2007) there were over 213,000 lenses on Squidoo. My smoothie lens was ranked #132 and at times has been as high as 128 with less than 8 hours of work total over one week. The second lens is for a favorite comic book character, Jean Grey (Phoenix) from the X-men and has done for pure entertainment and even that has achieved a rank as high as #376. The lenses were fun to build and I enjoyed both immensely.
Getting Traffic from Squidoo
Okay, big deal on my “success” within Squidoo, it hasn’t earned a single cent yet and might not ever. I have many links on my smoothie lens pointing to my smoothie blog and the good news is that these links have driven more traffic to my smoothie blog in the last week than all other incoming site traffic combined. The reason it has been successful is the fact that the Squidoo lens I created is already showing up in the search results, after less than a week, for terms related to smoothie recipes. (See results.) So it is driving traffic to my smoothie blog and could be doing the same for your business. If you sell toys you may want to create a Squidoo lens one of your products like yo-yos. The idea is to create a lens about something specific so your lens can rank for it and then link to your site. Which brings me to my other reason for creating a lens. My SEO heart practically skips a beat.
Link Building with Squidoo
As any SEO company can tell you, link building is the most time-consuming and hardest part of our jobs. Everything come down to link building. That is what increases your rankings, helps people find you and so forth. If you have an SEO company working for you now and they aren’t putting forth a majority of their time finding and placing links for you, it is time to move on. With Squidoo you get an awesome link building resource where you control the anchor text in the link, where the link points to, where it lives on the page and what is written around it. It also comes from a high PR site. It is almost the exact definition of my idea of the perfect link. If you look at my smoothie lens you can see dozens of links pointing to my smoothie blog. And not links just to the homepage, but deep linking to internal pages which are important links very difficult to get usually. Well, with Squidoo you can make many deep links which will help your site’s search engine visibility and increase rankings to those deep pages. One-way, keyword-rich, high-quality links are all made easy with Squidoo. If you spend a little time with your lens you may soon see it increase to a PR 4 or PR 5 webpage on its own and we know how hard PR 4 and 5 links can be to get on our own.
Google & Squidoo
Of course, with all good things there come people who look to ruin it by misuse. Well, the same can be said of Squidoo. Many spammers have tried and are trying to create a glut of spammy pages on Squidoo for the purposes of SEO. Google saw this and minimized the importance of Squidoo but in return Squidoo has made spamming harder and set the bar higher for a Squidoo lens in hopes of getting more quality lenses. It looks as though Squidoo may have weathered the fury of Google and for the time I would recommend highly creating a quality Squidoo lens to help your own site. Heck, create more than one if you need it, but be good stewards if you do and create lenses that have weight of their own and are not a pure marketing ploy. Those lenses will be the most effective in the long run and help Squidoo remain a useful tool in your marketing tool belt.
Final Thoughts on Squidoo
Give it a try, it will only take an hour or so, despite the 5 minute promise from Squidoo, and then see what you think. We will be including it as part of our work for our clients, as we do with all new strategies that can help. Of course, Google could decide they don’t appreciate the work being done by Squidoo members, Squidoo could decide to make all links not SEO-friendly (nofollow or redirects) or any number of SEO killing decisions, but until then I personally think it is a good use of a few hours.
YouTube Video about Squidoo Marketing
You can find many videos on how to use Squidoo and here is one of the better ones I watched.
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33 Responses to “Squidoo for Traffic & Link Building - SEO Tip Week 32”
By Kimberly Dawn Wells on Aug 13, 2007 | Reply
Glad to see you’re having fun with Squidoo. Keep up the great work!
By Shell Harris on Aug 13, 2007 | Reply
Hi, Kimberly (never Kim).
Thanks for visiting my blog and I’m flattered that you took notice of my post. I am enjoying Squidoo and lenses such as your are a reason why. Keep up the great work as well.
By Xavier on Aug 14, 2007 | Reply
I’m enjoying reading this post! Thanks!
By Martin on Aug 15, 2007 | Reply
Hello, can somebody tell my where i can find a seo tool which can show me the positions from a website (5, 10, 20 Keywords)? Please give feedback to me. bye
By Louiss on Aug 15, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for this weeks tips. I have try to do links from Squidoo, but I still cannot see the effect, do I miss out anything? I just need at least get some backlink from them. That’s all. Hope you can help me fix it up. my squidoo is here: http://www.squidoo.com/bloggingsecret
By SEO Beginner's Blog on Aug 16, 2007 | Reply
Hi, very informative blog. Thanks for visiting SEO Practices Blog for beginners, we are a guide to the best search engine optimization and marketing resources.
I’m on squidoo, my user is seopractices, I have add some affiliate links from books on amazon, I’m waiting to see the results.
By Andrew Christiansen on Aug 17, 2007 | Reply
nice read
By Hobo on Aug 17, 2007 | Reply
Nice article Shell. I used it for citation purposes a while back, but not to your extent.
Shaun
By Inkode on Aug 19, 2007 | Reply
Thank you so much for such a great article about using Squidoo for SEO. Goin to give it a go right now for marketing a clients site. But like you said, I can imagine it won’t be long till people “ruin it by misuse”. Cheers
By Shell Harris on Aug 19, 2007 | Reply
Martin, we use two tools that can both do what I think you are asking. One is Web Position Gold, $150 (http://www.web-positiongold.com/standard-web-position-gold.html) and the other is Internet Business Promoter, $250 (http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/download/index.htm). Both do a lot more than just show ranking results. But they both have free demos to try. Good luck.
By Shell Harris on Aug 19, 2007 | Reply
Hi, Shaun. I always know I’ve done something good when you comment. Thanks for the compliment. Feel free to post a link to your Squidoo article.
By Angie Hartford on Aug 25, 2007 | Reply
This sounds so very cool! I can think of a couple of clients who could really benefit from this. Thank you.
By Andy on Oct 31, 2007 | Reply
http://services-seo.net/pagerank-calculator/index.php?do=1
check how to get good PR.
By just a guy on Nov 10, 2007 | Reply
Shell, I’ve been putting this off for a while because I didn’t really understand the whole Squidoo thing. However, tonight I took the plunge and launched my Going to Seminary Squidoo lens. We’ll see how it all pans out. Thanks for the tip.
By Shell Harris on Nov 11, 2007 | Reply
Just a Guy,
I took a look at your lens and that is a good start! Be sure to put a few more modules up and put some more content on the lens. You are linking to your outside site correctly, although I would make all the links to the full url (www.domain.com rather than domain.com). Keep an eye on your site’s traffic. You may see a nice jump in visits from your Squidoo lens.
By just a guy on Nov 12, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for the advice. I’ll make the changes tonight. I was trying to figure out how to increase the pagerank of the lens. Any advice there? I’ve joined some groups that have good PR and posted blurbs with links to my squidoo lens. Any other ideas?
By Shell Harris on Nov 12, 2007 | Reply
You are doing all the right things. Google just did a PR update at the end of October so you will have to wait a while to see it change again. A good squidoo marketing (group submissions and commenting on other lenses) effort should be enough to achieve a PR4 or PR3, but PR is only a number not a declaration of your page’s importance.
By quiel on Jan 12, 2008 | Reply
Wow! Amazing, your article gave me an idea about squidoo. Thanks! You’re a big help! I think I’m going to try it in the near future to introduce myself and promote the site that I’m currently working on. I think I’m excited to create my own squidoo lens(page) after watching the video.
By Suchmaschinenoptimierung on Jan 16, 2008 | Reply
Great article, and great information, i got all my information about squidoo through your article thanks. But the video no longer exists
By Shell Harris on Jan 16, 2008 | Reply
I just checked and the video is playing fine for me. Just in case here is the actual url:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiR5BIX-_RQ
By Just a Guy on Jan 23, 2008 | Reply
Shell,
Just an FYI. After taking your squidoo tips my seminary and photography web hosting squidoo pages both have PR 3. Also, using a lot of the tips from your blog my Going to Seminary website has a PR 4.
As you say, “PR is only a number” but it feels good to see the effort pay off in such a short time.
Thanks!
By Dave @ Seo Blog on Jan 23, 2008 | Reply
Maybe a little late for a reply (when checking the original date of posting) but I would like to know if you still think the same way about squidoo and if your test is still running, how about the traffic, did it change and how about the conversions ?
It looks like squidoo is till doing fine in Google and they still didn’t implemented the nofollow tag so it still looks like a good Seo technique to use to get deeplinks to your site.
Thanks !
Dave
By Shell Harris on Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
Dave - Traffic on all my Squidoo lenses dropped off about 20% on average, but as high as 50% my Jean Grey Lens which is currently ranked #45 overall. I get about 30 visitors per day. From my 13 lenses I get about $80 per month, but I don’t update them anymore. But they all have achieved PageRank and the links from the Squidoo lenses are the real reason I created them, which support the “main” sites. Google traffic was the biggest decrease of all sources so I believe Google isn’t ranking the lenses nearly as well anymore.
Overall, still worth the 2-4 hours it can take to build a simple lens, especially for the deep links you can create.
By Dave @ Seo Blog on Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
Thxs for the response Shell !
Interesting the traffic dropped that much…it also looks like it are not really ‘buyers’ that are being redirected to your money site..guess the links are the only reason to create some Squidoo pages
these days.
Dave
By Domain on Jan 29, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for this information, it`s very useful
By Pizza Köln on Feb 19, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for your great information. very very good.
By edwin on Feb 27, 2008 | Reply
I made my own lens a week ago, it is worth the effort, but don’t make the mistake thinking its a small effort. Building a well ranked lens takes some time. And there is the risk of Google forcing nofollow upon squidoo in the long run.
By Shell Harris on Feb 27, 2008 | Reply
We put at least 4 - 8 hours in making a decent lens. Yes, one day the dreaded nofollow tag may be inflicted, but I don’t think so. Squidoo makes their money on increasing the page count and therefor increasing viewership. Adding nofollow might cripple the number pages being built and reduce traffic. I feel they’ll keep the nofollow out of the equation. Of course if a 800lb. Gorilla asks you to add it, you probably will.
By Squidoo Marketer on Mar 6, 2008 | Reply
I typically spend about 3 hours making each lens on Squidoo, $10-20 in social bookmarking services, and then I watch the traffic pour in through Google. Once Squidoo imposes a nofollow tag I will simply take my content elsewhere and continue to make money, but once there are mandatory nofollow it will cease to be a profitable company in my honest opinion.
By Jeremy on Mar 9, 2008 | Reply
After reading your review of Squidoo and the process of setting up a lense i figured it was time to revisit Squidoo and try out making a lense. I’ve noticed lenses in google results occasionally but there doesn’t seem to be a flood of them so it does seem like you need a pretty popular lense or a fairly niche topic. So i setup, ‘Australian web design’ and shall see how it goes: http://www.squidoo.com/australianwebdesign
By Yaprak Dökümü Fan Sitesi on Apr 1, 2008 | Reply
Great thank you very very much. Great Article. Keep up your great work!
By Joel on May 3, 2008 | Reply
They still use nofollow on some of the lenses I created. Is the same for everyone?
Nofollow everywhere on the lenses!
By Web hosting Jan on May 3, 2008 | Reply
Very helpful information, ya squidoo really is very good for seo page rank and can drive great traffic.
But i have seen people saying they are making great money on squidoo though. i have recently start my lens on squidoo i hope it work for me.
one think more did you know that squidoo has about 2,000,000 daily visitors wow surly it can drive much traffic to your site if you have a niche lens.