How to Legally Steal Traffic on Squidoo

Yes. Steal traffic legally.

This is a follow up to one of my previous posts about the new Squidoo Greetbox Feature. If you haven’t heard about this yet – then read this first – Should you play the discovery game?

As I had mentioned I turned on the discovery tab on all my lenses. A couple of my lenses have benefited tremendously from this tool.

One of my lenses is a mini lensography – Halwa Recipes. More than 50% of the traffic on this lens comes from the Discovery tool. You would have noticed that Squidoo has started sharing this info as a part of the Lens Stats. While getting traffic from one of your lenses is fine – the fun begins when you begin to get traffic from a competitive lens.

On another of my lenses – I again happen to receive more than 50% of my totally traffic from the Discovery Feature and this traffic is coming to me from a competing lens which is fabulous lens in itself. (I don’t want to name these lenses here – lest I lose this traffic stream..lol). The Competing Lens is ranking on Page 1 of Google for a very competitive keyword for which I haven’t yet been able to rank.

But I am receiving at least some of the benefits from the SEO work done by my friend with the competing lens, while I enjoy some free traffic, just for turning to discovery tab on.

But of course, this is a double edged sword and I could be losing some traffic from my lenses as well. It would be interesting if Squidoo would also show us the stats where my lenses have referred traffic to other lenses via the discovery tool. While some amount of traffic shift shouldn’t be an issue, if there is a significant traffic diversion, this would signal a need for some urgent sprucing up of the lens.

So now you know how to legally steal traffic on Squidoo – but just be careful, you might be losing some too.

10 Ideas to Create Backlinks for your Squidoo Lenses

One of the primary tasks for any lensmaster is to create backlinks for their Squidoo Lenses. They should be dofollow links and preferably with the primary keywords in the anchor text. Let's discuss 10 ideast to generate backlinks for your lenses.

1. Squid U Forum: This is perhaps the simplest options. Head over to http://www.squidu.com  and leave  a post in the Critique me section. You will not only get a backlink but also some useful advice on your lens from helpful lensmasters.
   
2. Lens Directory Submission: Submit your Lens to Lens directories. Couple of popular ones that I have used are IsleofSquid and Squidig. The links are dofollow and you can control the anchor text as well. A quick way to add some links.
   
3. Blog Commenting: Comment on a related blog. This may be a no-follow link – but it can get you traffic – if the blog on which you are commenting has a good traffic. It's generally preferable if you are among the first few commenters. The links in these comments have a better chance of being clicked upon.
   
4. Squidoo Groups: Join a related group on Squidoo. This is a simple but very powerful tool.Some Group pages have very good PR and a link from such pages will be very valuable in terms of link juice.
   
5. Squidoo Lens Comments: Submit a genuine comment on a related lens and if you feel that your lens can be a value add to the other lens – leave a link. Use this very scarcely and sensibly though.
6. Blog about your Lens: Write a blog post on your own blog (if you don’t have one – get started today).They will not only help you index your lenses faster but will also help you build good backlinks.
   
7. Niche Forums: Join a forum related to your niche and have the link in your forum signature. You can have links in your Squidu Forum signature as well.
   
8. Social Bookmarking: This one is probably a no-brainer. You can join the popular social bookmarking sites and add a link to your lens(Digg, Reddit, Stumpleupon). Be careful though and do some research on the bookmarking strategies for these sites. For Stumbleupon, especially you need ot be careful to not stumble only your squidoo lenses. You have to providing value so you need to be stumbling a variety of websites with one or two squidoo lenses in between. 1 Squidoo lens in 10 other websites will be a safe area. However there is a new kid on the block- Redgage – Not only can you post your lenses there, but you can also make from money from just posting links. Very interesting.
   
9. Other Web 2.0 sites: Join Hubpages and create a hub on a related topic and create links to your Squidoo page.  (hint – you can make money here as well). This is quite similar to lensmaking but has its own peculiarities.
   
10. Give me your ideas: I would love to have some comments here.
    

Blank Website Ranking on Page 1 of Google for Keyword with 64.8 million Competing Websites

There was a time when all you had to do was stuff your webpage with your chosen keywords and do it over and over again and you could fool the search engines into believing that your site was the most relevant and rewarding you with page 1 SERPs.

Times have since changed and Google has changed its algorithms and does not look at keyword spamming in good light. However there are strategic locations on your website which provide the most juice to your keywords and one of those is the URL.

Having your keywords in the URL is an absolute must. I recently saw a video on the net in the course of recent launch of an IM product. It talked about how a blank Wordpress blog with ranked on page 1 of Google for a given competitive keyword.

Image Courtesy Bull3t  through a Creative Commons License

I was just playing around a while earlier and came across another such example. This is an extremely competitive keyword – 64.8 million pages in competition with a monthly average search of 550,000. Sounds difficult to crack – hardly…!!

Type the keyword “Indian food” without the quotes in Google. On position 6 – you will find a blank website with the URL – http://www.indianfood.com

This led me to think of how important the words in your URL must be in the eyes of search engines – and that too Big Daddy Google.

Think about it!

The Best Free Keyword Research Tool for Squidoo - Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Okay Friends - This is a cheat post!

I have been wanting to write on this topic ever since I've started this blog. Just when I thought that I have got my thoughts in place to write this post, I came across this post from a dear friend and fellow Factor-Y lensmaster - Chef Keem

How To Use The Google AdWords Tool For Free Keyword Research

This has everything that I wanted to say and this post just hits the proverbial nail on the lens head!

Enjoy this post and while you are on Squidlog, just enjoy the blog. It's truly amazing.

The Squidoo Greetbox - Should you play the Discovery Game?

 

Image courtesy Noadi—noadi.net through Creative Commons License. 

The Squidoo Greetbox is one of the latest features introduced by Squidoo. This is what I love about Squidoo- their NSI approach - Never Stop Innovating. They are on the constant lookout to make Squidoo better and better each day.

The Squidoo Greetbox is another of its masterstrokes to combat spammers or irrelevant content. The way this is going to work is - visitors who are not logged on to Squidoo will be shown 3 related lenses that they could visit if the lens that showed up was not relevant. This could be both a boon and a bane to lensmasters. If the lens in the greetbox is more visually appealing - the user might click onto that lens, while I have done all the SEO hardwork to bring the user to my lens. It probably means that we as lensmasters will have to be more careful about both the content and the look of our lenses to keep visitor stay put on our page.

But ofcourse, if you participate in the venture - (oh yes, you have to opt-in on the Discovery Tab in the Intro Module), you can potentially benefit from having your lens featured on other related lenses.

To sum up, I think it is atleast worthwhile to explore and start experimenting whether this is working for your lenses.

So while I am off to switching on the Discovery feature on my lenses, you can go and check out the original post on the Official Squidoo Blog

Free Seo Tool - Search Engine Optimisation at your fingertips

Yes.

It's free.
It's a desktop tool.
It's very easy to use and extremely useful.




It's got a host of free features and it even has a SEO training course. Really useful for newbies who have no clue about SEO. One of the features I regularly use is the Search engine rankings page. This one tool saves a whole host of your times. You can add all the keywords that you are targeting for your Squidoo lens and immediately track where your lens ranks in all the top search engines for your keywords. Extremely useful to understand, where your lens stands among the competition.

So what are you waiting for. Its free. Go Grab it!

3 tips for improving your Squidoo lensrank

How Squidoo Lensrank is computed is always going to remain a mystery, but there are some very obvious guidelines, which one should follow to improve one's squidoo lensrank.

I have been around squidoo for a while and have most of my lens in the top 10000. Based on my experience, i want to highlight a few tips for improving your lensrank.

1. Fresh,Unique and Updated Content - This is perhaps one of the basic underlying factors in Squidoo. You need to have great content and keep on updating it frequently. To used to oft repeated cliche "Content is King".

2. Traffic - In my opinion, this aspect is one of the most important drivers in the Squidoo lensrank algorithm. If you have superb traffic, then your lens will continue to rank high, even though you dont have any fresh ratings, angel blessings or amazon/ebay sales. I say this from personal experience. One of my lens stayed put in the tier 1 for an entire month without a single update from me, solely on the strength of the regular flow of traffic. In fact if you start getting enough organic traffic, your lens will really be on autopilot and you will just have to keep tweaking it just once or twice a month.

3. Be Nice - The world is a very nice place and if you be nice to people, people will be doubly nice to you. If you look at some of the Giant squids and the most successful lensmasters, they will have rated and favorited 100s of other lens. What you give, you will get in return. One of my endeavours, is to try rating atleast 3-5 lenses a day and leave a comment or a feedback on squidoo. Invariably it does translate into a visit to your own lens, a rating, a comment etc. A word of caution though. Dont do this just to get ratings or comments. Do it with genuine intention of helping other people improve their lens, or give honest ratings and comments. Spam comments can be sniffed from miles away. Be nice to people and your lensrank will definitely improve.

There is a fantastic e-book just recently put together by some of the giant squids which has some really lovely tips for squidoo. Check it out here

Delete Irrelevant Content or Links to improve Squidoo Lensrank

All fellow Lensmasters.

I know it can be an excruciating wait for that daily lensrank update- when you've just tweaked your lens and you wonder whether your lensrank will be positively affected.

I am still fairly new to squidoo - but I think i have realised atleast one factor which does have an impact on your squidoo ranking once you have had a fair bit of Content or Links on your squidoo lens. Delete any Content or Links which are Irrelevant or not connected to your keyword or main topic of your Squidoo Lens. I have done that twice and i notice a decent improvement in my Squidoo Lensrank.

One of my lenses was doing fairly well on traffic and ranking and hence i thought i might leverage on that traffic and so I added links to my other lenses which were in dire need of some traffic. The links were not directly relevant. I thought it would improve the ranking of my other Squidoo lenses. In fact this irrelevant link did the opposite for all my Squidoo Lensrank. The well-progessing lens on which i had added the links to my other lenses, started falling in Lensrank while there was no benefit to the other lenses. Thats when i realised that i should delete those irrelevant links as well as delete all unrelated and irrelevant content from my squidoo lens.

It did work. Once I did delete all the unrelated content, my Squidoo Lensrank started showing signs of improvement. That's just one of tips from my experiences with Squidoo.

I will keep on posting more tips from my personal experiences. But the moral of this story is that we must edit our Squidoo Lenses on a regular basis and do some cleaning up. We must delete all Irrelevant Content or Links on our Lenses and then we will definitely witness an improvement in our Squidoo Lensrank

Do checkout some of my squidoo lenses