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As I am not a member of Tenfinity, the group of lensmasters that has brought us the Squidoo Step by Step guide, I decided that I can feel free to brag about it.

Squidoo Step by Step is the absolutely best and crystal clear Squidoo guidebook that I have seen since I started on Squidoo in June of 2008, almost 2 years ago.  I read through the book just yesterday, (no one says that I am the first to get to anything), and realized that I already know just about everything in the guide.  What that says to me is that I have learned quite a bit in my not quite 2 years on Squidoo.

However, much of what I have learned was learned through trial and error, learning and unlearning, and wasting a lot of time boiling instructions from several sources down to the bare bones.  Had I had this Squidoo Step by Step guidebook in my hands at the beginning, I would have reached where I am today much faster.  Squidoo Step by Step is an excellent resource for all lensmasters to understand the basics and the intermediary lessons that Squidoo has to teach us.

If you want to see if you are moving in the right direction, especially if Squidoo is your initiation to the internet web 2.0 or web 3.0, I highly suggest that you download a copy.  What is the price, you ask?  $29.95? $5.95?  Nope, the Squidoo Step by Step guide is completely free.  How about that!

Now the group that brought us the Squidoo Step by Step guide has also started a wonderful Ning called Professional Squids.  The idea behind Professional Squids is to help people understand the Squidoo Step by Step guide, and go beyond the guide.  And the group is, yep you guessed it, totally professional in nature.  And guess how much this Ning costs to join and continue the excellent learning that started in Squidoo Step by Step?!  Free again.  Two amazing free resources that will vastly improve your efficiency and proficiency on Squidoo.  What are you waiting for?

Join Professional Squids by clicking here!

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I wanted to bring your attention to a new feature on SquidU that I am doing called the Public Lens Critiques. This started in the Giant Challenge Ning, but since the Giant Challenge is not on the Ning anymore, we decided to move the critique to SquidU.

This critique is not meant for brand new newbies, but for lensmasters with some time under their belt. I am picking and choosing the lenses both from lenses people ask me to critique, and if no one does, I will most likely just randomly pick and choose.

The idea is for everyone to learn from each other, and to turn good lenses to great lenses with good SEO potential. And of course, sometimes a second pair of eyes picks up on things that you miss after revising your own work numerous times.

The first critique is here. If you would like your own lens critiqued, contact me via my contact me button on Squidoo.

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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.

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.

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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Lensmaster Rating:

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This resource has been evaluated by the SquidLog staff. If you are familiar with this service or website please help your fellow lensmasters by rating and/or commenting on the usefulness. You’ll help us focus our limited time on the resources which are worth the effort.

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