SEO and Ranking Flux for Squidoo Lenses
Arr... This Be The Captain! Thanks for Stopping by to check out my piratey bag of Squidoo Tricks! If you are new here, you might want to get free updates and squidoo tricks delivered straight to you via RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for a while and I noticed that Spirituality wrote an awesome post on her blog yesterday about all the Dynamic Links in Squidoo and how it affects Search Rankings.
I want to expand a little bit more on a few of the ideas that Spirituality threw out there. Here’s a brief excerpt I want to talk about:
I’ve been thinking about this, because squidoo is a place where a lot of the links are dynamic: they stay up only as long as your lens has a high lensrank. Getting your lens into the top 100 for instance is great for several reasons - one of which is that it’s a great link to have. BUT it’s a temporary link if your lens doesn’t actually stay in the top 100.
The links to your lens through squidoo can update on a moment’s notice or they can update daily or over an even longer time period. Squidoo is built on two or three primary drivers that help build links to individual pages.
The first factor built into Squidoo’s site architecture is Lensrank. Lensrank controls the appearance of your lens on the top 100 lists, how high your lens appears on tag pages, and to a lesser extent, how often it appears on the ‘Explore Related Lenses’ box.
The second factor to consider with Squidoo’s on-site SEO is tagging. I wrote a huge tutorial on tagging with squidoo for a reason. Tags are directly controlled by the Lensmaster and they directly determine which tag pages your lens can appear on and which lenses your lens will show as a ‘related’ lens for.
The intersection of these two factors is that the order of the lenses that appear on tag pages are governed by Lensrank.
Now, when you have a lens that gets a good chunk of traffic, this can quickly become a self - reinforcing cycle. When your lens climbs the ranks it begins to appear on more tag pages which causes those tag page backlinks to increase in quality significantly, possibly sending you even more traffic.
However, if your lens is just starting out how do you get enough backlinks to catch the eyes of the search engines if you don’t already have the traffic? There are a few simple solutions.
Go after some ‘medium’ tags that only are used by 20-40 other lenses. These tag pages are awesome for lenses that need to get indexed because it’s easy to get on the front tag page for these terms within a day or two (usually).
Go after one or two ‘huge’ tags. The giant tags on squidoo like ‘music’ or ‘business’ can actually be helpful. I’ve noticed that the ‘explore related lenses’ area of lenses don’t always take the top lenses from the tags to display. Sometimes a few of the lenses will be from other lenses that are tagged similarly and have a Lensrank in the same range. This can get you a little more exposure on other lenses plus even the second and third page on some of those big tags can still get you a visit by the search engine.
What do you think of the Squidoo on-site SEO? What tips do you have for getting into the lensrank/tag cycle quickly?
Did you enjoy today's Squidoo related post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to the Captain Squid RSS Feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader or email inbox for free.
Comments
One of the best boost to lensrank you can get is from StumbleUpon. If you are an active user of StumbleUpon, you can get a lot of traffic to your page. As your traffic goes up, your lensrank will also go up.
As far as lensrank and getting visitors, here are a few thoughts:
1. Announce your lens in the SquidU forum, put it in your SquidU signature, submit it to the “Critique Me” discussion.
2. Announce your lens on SquidTop.
3. Use StumbleUpon, Digg and similar sites
4. Comment on other lenses leaving a HTML link to your lens with your main keywords as the anchor text.
5. Remind other Squidoo users that ratings and favoriting are appreciated.
6. Build a related lens and use the lensroll feature to cross-promote.
Regards,
Fun With Trains