I know that many of you do not believe that a backlink or two can really have much effect on your Squidoo lenses or on your websites. I want to refute that argument once again. I have been doing some serious backlinking over the last several months ever since the beginning of the Google Panda changes. One reason was that I had to replace income that had been lost due to the Panda updates. The second reason was to test how much each factor had in the success of my sites being found.
Frankly, when I create a site, or a Squidoo lens, the goal for each page or lens is to be found on the first page of Google search for the specific keyword phrase that I am trying to rank for. I start with a single or a pair of keyword phrases, then as I reach my search engine goal for those, I add more if they are there to be added. On a multipage site, it is much easier to find more keyword phrases to rank for. Each page in the site, can have one or more phrases, depending on the length of the page.
When we are talking about Squidoo, we get an automatic boost by being on Squidoo in the first place. No matter what you hear in the rumor grist mill, writing on Squidoo pushes your page up in the SERPs higher than if you have written elsewhere (with a few notable exceptions). However, depending on the competition and age of the competing pages, you will still have to get out your elbow grease to push your page to the top half of the first page on Google.
The first way to do this is excellent keyword research. The second way is good backlinks.
I have a series of lenses in a niche that does pretty well. Last year I had only a few pages on my topic, and when I really looked at traffic, I decided to add several more. This year I have seen the success of these new pages for specific keywords that were not the original keywords that I thought they would rank for.
I am going to apologize to you because I am not going to tell you which niche I am talking about. You will have to find your own niche. However, once I realized what keywords to focus on (due to search engine traffic), I started a backlinking campaign for those keywords. The backlinks that I continue to add are pushing all of these pages from being on page 1 of Google for that keyword, to being in the number 1 spot on page 1.
The difference in the amount of traffic you get by moving your page up in the SERPS on page 1 is huge. Just moving it up one place makes a very big difference, especially on the top half of the page.
One of the best boosts to my pages has been by writing a Wizzley article then linking to a related Squidoo page. However, as I have mentioned before, I have given up just bookmarking for backlinks, and now concentrate on writing smaller articles of 150 to 200 words to create backlinks. These are working quite nicely.
If you are to the point where you are willing to pay for others to write for you, or you are not sure where to post your backlinking articles, then there are two paid sites that I will recommend.
BuildMyRank–BuildMyRank has unlimited sites for backlinks for one fee, and they will also write articles for you for an additional fee.
SEO Operation Cobra–SEO Cobra is a site you pay a monthly fee, and for that fee, you have access to a very large group of sites on different IP addresses to write articles on. At this time, the site has over 300 sites, but it is growing to a much larger network. At this time, you have to write your own articles.
The monthly fees for these two sites start at $59 per month, so in order to determine whether this is a good investment for you, you will have to examine potential and actual earnings vs. the cost. Until they are, you can still use your own time to find sites to backlink back to your pages.
But, if you put in the time, and continue to build the backlinks to your well paying, and well trafficked pages, you will find that eventually just to keep up, you will have to pay someone a fee, or spend hours, and hours doing it yourself. Until then, continue to build your backlinks to your pages via high quality article sites, like Wizzley, Pro Articles, your own blogs, or similar sites. Bookmarking is just not worth it for the return on your investment.
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I will have to think about this more. I agree that bookmarking is of almost no value when counting backlinks, but they do seem to help the indexing of backllinks. For example, my lenses are indexed faster when I bookmark them at a few sites.
I wonder if Google is preferring smaller articles (200 words) over larger articles (1000 words). In countless forums, I read opinions on either side.
Thanks Paula. I completely agree with you. I have been time and again telling my readers that you have to create links to your Squidoo lenses. You can create good content. But unless you push that content to the top of the search engines through good off-page SEO it won’t really count for much. Buildmyrank is an excellent way to get high PR backlinks. You need to be consistent though in submitting your posts to that network. I havent seen the other service you mention. I have been using Unique Article Wizard in conjunction with BMR to get the bulk of backlinks.
I need to spend time doing some backlink work. The only pages I have work on back links are my philately pages and websites and one of my philately niche is on first page of google for the three most used search term so it indeed pays off. I need to set a few hours a month to do just that and try interlinking my content too.
Really appreciate this info as I’m also in that arena of realizing the importance of backlinks. Not that I wasn’t aware of that but when I looked more closely at my lenses, some really stink in terms of backlinks even if the rest is good. So lately have pushed that way UP on my priority list. I create blog articles more often with links to lenses.and have also been using a service called IM automator where I and am slowly but surely adding lenses. Ever heard of that tool? I gather this service would fall more into the category of bookmarking rather than backlinks from what I understand. It’s simple to use and is free, so I can get in and out of there much more quickly than writing and publishing an article.
Hi Carolan,
I have heard of IMautomator although I do not use it myself. I prefer backlinks that are content related, and have a contextual link to my stuff.