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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was a foreign language to me when I first started on Squidoo, nearly a year ago – and yes, over here in the UK it’s spelt with an S not a Z! But one of the joys of Squidoo is that if you don’t know about something to do with Lenscrafting, getting traffic, SEO and a whole host of other stuff, then someone will have written a lens about it.

Best use of Keywords for Better SEO

Key tips on how to use Keywords for SEO – Part 1

When I was a child I was a sponge – well, that’s what my Mum says. Always looking for something new to learn and then I would just keep absorbing more and more knowledge. That mindset held me in good stead when I joined Squidoo. Boy did I just want to learn and learn I did.

Now I am no SEO or Keyword expert. I leave that title to Lensmasters like Spirituality – also known as Katinka. She has written some excellent lenses on Keyword research and SEO, but I did not realise exactly how much I had learned from Katinka until Chef Keem and I received an e-mail from our SquidPal, Evelyn Saenz.

Evelyn was in the process of helping her daughter raise funds for her College fees and like any good Lensmaster, she had one of those “Ah ha moments”. Ah ha moments? You know….something happens or you are involved in something and you think ”I should make a lens about that”!

But Evelyn’s “Ah ha moment” was slightly different to the ones I normally experience, because she decided to use the lens to market a Hand-made quilt to help raise the money to send her daughter to College. She emailed The Chef and myself asking if we would take a look at the lens and give her some totally honest feedback. I must say I was honoured that Evelyn valued my opinion, because if you have ever visited any of her Lenses, then you will know she is an outstanding Lensmaster.

Now when I got the e-mail I was unable to respond immediately. I was in the final throes of publishing a new lens and would you believe it? The girls actually had the audacity to want their dinner! So it was the next day before I could take a proper look.

The Chef had already responded (he obviously does not have enough to do, tee hee!) and looked at the lens from the Sales angle, so I decided to look at the lens from the Keyword and SEO angle. Over the past few months I have adopted a specific process when optimising my lenses and so I shared it with Evelyn.

In addition to the module titles and text in my lenses, there’s several areas I focus on when looking at where to put my key words. This first of two articles will focus on the URL and the Intro.

Before I even “grab the URL” for a new lens, I do some Keyword research. I use the tips that Spirituality gives in various lenses included in her own personal Answer Deck. Once I have decided on my key phrase, only then do I try to find a URL that will utilise this key phrase.

When I looked at Evelyn’s URL, I was relieved to see that it was http://www.squidoo.com/handmade-quilt. “Handmade quilt” is an obvious key phrase for this lens. I do not know if Evelyn researched this phrase and if it was indeed the best phrase, but it is what we had to work with and it could have been worse!

What would have been worse? Just “quilt” would have been very difficult to work with because the focus would not have been narrow enough.

For Better SEO – Put The Keyword In Your Lens Intro!

The first thing I noticed was that Evelyn did not have her key phrase in her Intro title or in the Intro itself. Her Lens Title was “Handmade Quilt for College”, which I thought was OK but I suggested she change the intro title from “The College Quilt” to “The Handmade College Quilt”.

I then went on to look at the intro text. You have to remember that Google will quote the first couple of sentences in the description on the search results page and it is essential that your key phrase is in there. Oops! There was no sign of “handmade quilt”.

I advised Evelyn to re-work the intro and without overdoing it, make sure the phrase was included in the first sentence and to put it in bold. Then I suggested that she go through the rest of the intro and carefully sprinkle “handmade quilt” into the text a couple more times.

Was that all? No, but you will have to wait for Part 2, to find out what else we did.

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