How to increase Squidoo Lens Rankings

As I've mentioned in previous articles about Squidoo, embedding videos into articles I add to the website is an important part of my SEO battle plan for driving traffic to my Youtube videos. In this article I'll talk about some very easy ways I increase traffic to my lenses so they pass link juice to my primary websites.

There is a step by step PDF about what to do titled, Squidoo Step by Step. You should definitely read it before the rest of this article.

Add your articles to Squidoo focused directories

The key is to submit your lenses to directories that specialize in Squidoo content.

These websites are,

Every lens you make should be submitted to all of these directories, as they will provide high PageRank backlinks to the lenses and the sites are followed by people who are looking for great Squidoo articles.

Create and submit an RSS feed for your lenses

You can also create an RSS feed for your Squidoo lenses. Normally Squidoo doesn't provide a link for this but through a third party website called http://squidutils.com/ you can obtain it. By associating your account with them you can generate an RSS feed of all your lenses, and then submit them to the directories. There is also a tool for allowing you to ping search engines when you update an individual lens.

As an example, here is my lensmaster RSS feed,

http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lensmaster/carey-martell

There are many RSS directories you can submit your feed to that will boost your rankings just by getting listed but these directories are also used by hundreds of thousands of people every month. Getting listed will introduce new audiences to your articles.

Check out this article from me for a list of directories you can submit to, as well as some info about Youtube channel RSS feeds.

Cross Promote with other Squidoo authors

Cross promoting with other authors is great!

Another great technique is to reach out to other Squidoo authors and cross-promote each other's lenses and blog articles which have related subject matter. This is effective because everyone wants backlinks to their articles, and including backlinks to one another's content saves both parties from having to manually create another link.

There are even Facebook Groups formed specifically to allow Squidoo authors who wish to network to find one another.

Granted not everyone in these groups always understands what you are trying to do. Many people do not fully understand the Penguin and Panda updates to Google Search, and seem to be under the impression cross-promotion is not allowed by Squidoo or Google.

Some of the conversations I've had with people about the topic of cross-promotion leads me to believe that they think Google can detect the motivation of every link on every article, when that is impossible. What Google does is punish content mirroring, because content mirroring is obviously being done for promotional purposes. Google also punishes linking to articles which have no relevent keywords to the page the link is coming from; for example, making an article about Dora the Explorer link to an article about astrophysics wouldn't be considered relevant, but linking Dora the Explorer article to another about cartoons would be perfectly fine.

The unfortunate reality is that many people would rather sit at their laptops all day writing their own articles on thousands of websites than collaborate with other users to maximize efforts.

In the end, it may take a lot of effort and approaching people individually to get some results with cross promotion.

Despite what naysayers claim, mutual backlinking is allowed on Squidoo

Buy other people's lenses

Another thing you can do is just buy other people's pre-made lenses that have established search engine rankings, and then use them to add link juice to other articles you've made. To assist with the buying and selling of lenses, check out this Facebook Group, "Buying and Selling Squidoo Lenses".

There is also this page over at webnuggetz.com where you can buy pre-made Lenses for $5.

The benefit of buying lenses is you can use them to add links to your other lenses, increasing the reach you have and expanding your network of articles.

Constantly revise your articles

Due to the way Google works, the "freshness" of an article matters. The more you update an existing page, the fresher it is valued by Google. So because of this "fresh factor" many Squidoo authors take advantage of it by revising their lenses every week and then alerting search engines to the changes by using a service like Ping-o-matic.

Personally I find this tactic requires too much time and effort, largely because I already have a heavy workload. Constantly making tweaks to existing articles just to bump them a little higher isn't as worthwhile for me as creating brand new articles so they can send link juice to other articles. Still this tactic may be worthwhile for you to try.

I hope this post of mine has given you a lot of useful ideas on how you can increase views to your Squidoo Lenses and boost their rankings.

Follow Carey on Google+

Tuesday, August 7, 2012