Build a Squidoo Lens to Promote Your Website
Despite its funny sounding name, Squidoo is a serious tool that every webmaster should use to help drive traffic to their website. Squidoo is a popular social networking website where people write extended articles known as "lenses". Since users can create these extended chunks of information that most people really do find to be helpful, Squidoo is gaining popularity fast as a resource for information as well as a source of backlinks for webmasters.
To use Squidoo, you simply sign up for a free account. Once you validate your account, you can create as many lenses as you want on any topic that you want. Each lens is composed of different modules that you can create, delete or move around in any way that you want. The main modules are text modules that serve as the main textual content. The text modules allow you to create a big chunk of text on a webpage without having to know anything about HTML. You can also have modules for user comments, polls, Amazon.com resources, donations, Flickr photos, etc. You have an almost unlimited variety of webpage variations at your disposal.
Let's look at some of the modules in more detail:
- Text/Write Module- This is where you place your unique content with keywords to attract traffic.
- Link List - Let's you put some key links to outside sites. This is one way to get a backlink to your website
- Polls. Use polls to interact with your readers. Polls are known to attract more attention because so many people want to express their opinions
- YouTube: You can even upload YouTube videos onto your lens to give readers audiovisual information.
- Amazon: Lets you post books and other resources on Amazon.com that your readers might find to be helpful
- RSS: Lets you create your own RSS feed
How Does A Squidoo Lens Increase Website Traffic?
You can use a Squidoo lens to increase traffic in two ways. First, the lens will allow you to give a backlink to your own website or site, and every new backlink will help your website to move up the search engine rankings for keyword search terms. This is especially true in that the search engines will see your Squidoo lens as a highly relevant backlink for your website.
Second, you can use your Squidoo lens as a way to present information that gets updated over time. Like a blog, you can keep coming back and updating various components of the lens to make it more likely that readers will want to come back. It's a great idea to view some of the top lenses in your categories of interest to see what content these authors put on their lenses. You can get some great ideas this way about how to improve your lens.
It is also a really good idea to tag your lens with as many tags as Squidoo allows, which is twenty. The more tags you use, the more likely it is that a link to your lens will show up as a related lens on other lenses, which means that other people may click to visit your lens.
Finally, remember that your Squidoo lens is another webpage that you can try to link to in order to bring it traffic. By getting some links from blogs or forums to your lens, and by linking your lens to your website, you can definitely start to drive more traffic to your website, and hopefully start to make more sales of whatever products or services you offer.