Lens promotion can be exhausting – articles, bookmarking, posting in forums – but it doesn’t have to be that way. Pressed for time? Here’s my strategy for doing a little work up front before I pick my lens title in order to give my lens some extra Google oomph.
Almost 30%, or nearly one-third, of my 31 lenses get more than 30 visits a week. This isn’t some magical benchmark and may not be overly impressive – but considering that I’ve stopped spending hours trying to find quality backlinks and writing articles, I don’t think this is all that bad and it’s a whole lot better than zero.
"Hill of Learning" by Heather Katsoulis
For each topic idea, I enter a keyword or phrase into
Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool and dig into the tool’s results. Google’s tool will return a list of similar search terms including the one I entered and it will show me competition and monthly searches for those keywords.
I’m looking for a phrase that meets the following criteria:
1. Describes my topic and/or products effectively
2. Has a monthly search volume between 700 and 20,000 a month
3. Has a search trend line that is steady or increasing
4. Has low competition from other websites
5. A phrase I can include easily in a sentence
Eventually, I’ll find a great keyword/phrase that will literally work FOR me.
Next, I validate my keyword/phrase by checking three pieces of information in Google:
Total Google Results
Enter keyword/phrase into Google’s search box and note total listings for that keyword/phrase. I’m not put off by high results. I have a lens that ranks on the 1st page of Google for my keyword/phrase and there are over 4 million results for that phrase. I just want an idea of the potential pool of interest.
Google Inanchor Results
type inanchor: keyword/phrase in Google’s search box and see how many sites have backlinks linking to them with this keyword/phrase in the link (the higher this number, the more work I might have to do to compete with other sites who already have established quality backlinks). I seem to rank fairly quickly in Google for inanchor results less than 5000, although I do have a couple of lenses that rank on the 1st page for my keyword/phrase and have over 200,000 competing inanchor results.
Intitle/Inanchor
type intitle:”keyword/phrase” inanchor:”keyword/phrase” in Google’s search box and see how many sites have keyword/phrase in their URL string and in the text other sites used to link to that page.
Intitle/inanchor is the sweetspot. If there are less than 10, a little time and good content will get a lens on the 1st page of Google pretty quickly.
If the keyword/phrase doesn’t validate, I go back to the drawing board. If it passes my test, I use it as the URL for my lens and start building.
The Easier Way by Heather Katsoulis
Using this strategy, I published a lens about
desktop stress relief on April 26, 2009. By April 29th, it was the 3rd listing on the 1st page of Google and all I did after I published was to submit it to
Zimbio, an RSS submission site, and add it to the list of links in my personal blog. I can always do some additional promotion later but meanwhile, I’m sitting on the 1st page of Google for my keyword/phrase and in the past 7 days I’ve had 27 visitors from Google and 5 visitors from Yahoo.
This is just a baby step in terms of search engine optimization but if, like me, you have limited time to spend on each lens and want to grab some visitors early in the game, take some time to plan out your lens URL before you push that Make A New Lens button.
Final Tip: Keyword phrases that center around a word that’s not a product you can buy seem to have an easier time getting into Google. Words like cook, happy, stress are easier than furniture, book, or t-shirt.
There’s loads of experience out there wandering this blog. Tips, ideas, modifications to this strategy? We’d love to hear ‘em!
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