Captain Squid is one of my favorite Squidoo bloggers. His Squidoo tips blog always has the BEST information and tools for lensmasters. Naturally, inviting Captain Squid to be a guest blogger here at PotPieGirl was a no-brainer! Today, Captain Squid will be sharing a cool tip about using YouTube to build back links to your Squidoo lenses.

A BIG welcome to Captain Squid!

—————

Passive Link Building with YouTube

Arrr, This is the Captain here. PotPieGirl asked if I could sail over from Captain Squid and write a little about Squidoo for you. As I think that PotPieGirl is a fine upstanding Squidooer in general and Pirate in particular, I was happy to oblige.

I wanted to spend my few words talking about the YouTube module on Squidoo and how 3 seconds of your time can build multiple high PR backlinks to your lens with zero additional effort.

I know, I know it sounds like a scam… but it really is that easy.

Here’s how:

This is what the YouTube Module edit screen looks like:

1) Set your videos to ‘Let YouTube Pick’ - When this setting is selected a video is picked from YouTube that matches your ‘tags’ (step 3).

2) Show Full Size Video - You don’t want people leaving your lens to watch the video! You just want to get the backlink from YouTube.

3) Enter Tags - Enter tags that are fairly specific to your lens. You don’t want to have a random video that is not applicable popping up. If you keep getting random videos, try searching on YouTube until you find a series of search terms that allow you to return the video you want.

How this Works -

When you have a YouTube module, every time the video is ‘watched’ on your lens, you get a ‘click’ that counts towards a backlink to that video. The top 5 pages in ‘click #’ are linked to by the video.

Example:

This is off of a random PR1 YouTube video where one of my lenses has ‘Star Wars Boy’ in the ‘Tags’ section. As you can see, I have the top two spots and so I get a little link juice from YouTube.

Ok, that explains why YouTube is good, but why is letting Youtube pick the video good?

For this reason right here:

This is a view of my backlinks from Squidaholic (a new SEO tool for lenses that I’m Sure PotPieGirl has told you about and will link to her post right about here ).

As you can see, Youtube Videos are 3 of the top 5 backlinks for this lens. Over time, as YouTube rotates videos because of changes in their video listings, you build up ‘clicks’ on all the ones your visitors see. Not only does this keep your lens fresh for google, it also passively builds backlinks.

See, that didn’t hurt at all now did it? Now go be Piratey and build some lenses! The Captain Says so!

Captain Squid

—————

Thank you, Captain! What a great Squidoo tip! Want more Squidoo video training and tips? Head on over to www.CaptainSquid.com today.

Sign up to get new posts from PotPieGirl.com sent to your Inbox