YES! You do need a blog to promote your Squidoo lenses and the main reason is Backlinks, which is an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I even blog about my blogs in order to establish backlinks!
What are backlinks?
In the Squidoo Step by Step Guidebook backlinks, which are sometimes called incoming links, are defined as:
links to a web page or the entire website. They are links from another website that are pointing to your website or Squidoo lens. They can point to your Home Page or a specific post, when it is referred to as Deep Linking.
Backlinks are important to your search engine rankings because the higher the number of backlinks the higher your page will rank in the search engines.
However, it is not just the number of backlinks but the quality of those backlinks. Quality can be judged by how high the page linking to yours is ranked in Google.
If you link to too many sites that have no Google Page rank, then your own page rank will suffer.
Each time you blog about your Squidoo lenses, you have the opportunity to establish backlinks. If your blog is hosted on a site that has a decent Google Page Ranking, then your blog will benefit from that. To give an example, Squidlog has a Google Page Rank of 2 and with the ever growing content and activity, this should increase. Any blog hosted on the site will benefit from the Page Rank and this benefit will increase as the Site Page Rank increases.
It is the same with stand alone blogs, a good Google Page Ranking will benefit your lenses through having quality backlinks. However, it is often more difficult to build a Google Page Rank for a stand alone blog, unless you are a celebrity or well known sports person of course!
Blogs are also an important component of any Link Wheel you are trying to establish for a lens – the principals are the same, whether it is a blog at the hub of the wheel or a lens. However, our blogs always provide us with the opportunity to add backlinks for our lenses, often just in the normal course of writing.
Always use phrases in your blogs that naturally flow in the narrative, but always be on the look out for an opportunity to add a link. Of course there will be times when you will plan to blog about a specific lens and that makes it easier, but be careful of linking out too many times to the same URL – a couple will be just fine.
About AJ
