Improve Search Engine Placement of a Squidoo Lens – Part 1

Better search engine placement is the magic key to a ‘make money while you sleep’ web site. When you have a top placement in the search engines, your site will benefit from all that free (organic) traffic. You don’t have to keep promoting just to GET traffic and you can avoid PPC advertising and paying for traffic. Face it – free traffic rocks!

So let’s say you have a site…. how about a Squidoo lens… that is ranking in the search engines – just not high enough. Improved search engine rankings are your goal…. so how to you improve search engine ranking for your Squidoo lens?

Squidoo SEO to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings

In part 1 of this series, we will focus on basic ON-page SEO optimization techniques you can do to enjoy improved search engine placement. If you haven’t already, go back and read How to SEO Optimize a Squidoo Lens (will open in a new window so you don’t lose your place). While creating your lens, it is imperative that you focus on the SEO ‘hot-spots’ that are available within your Squidoo modules. How to SEO Optimize a Squidoo Lens will show you how to optimize your<title> tag, the <h> header tags, your keywords, your description and other Metas that can make a difference to your over-all search engine placement.

After you have created your Squidoo lens, or you have a Squidoo lens you feel is ‘ready to go’ – let’s analyze it and see what the search engines will think.

How to Analyze your Squidoo Lens

First off, I want you to go to this free tool that analyzes web sites and web pages. Again, it will open in a new window so we can work together.

Go ahead an enter your exact web address of your Squidoo lens (include the http://). Answer the little question following your url. This question is designed to make sure you are a human and not some program spamming this wonderful free tool.

Ok – click ‘submit’

How to Read Your Squidoo Analysis

There will be a LOT of info on this page. This info is important and you will love it for pages on actual web sites to assist you. However, for the purposed of improving search engine placement of Squidoo lenses, we will focus on 3 things.

Under ‘Meta Tag Analysis’:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

Optimizing the Title of a Squidoo Lens

This is VERY… V-E-R-Y important for SEO optimization. If you were only going to focus on ONE SEO procedure, the <title> tag would be it. Let me repeat this for the kids in the back of the class….

The Title Tag is VERY VERY important. Do not neglect it.

For the sake if this SEO lesson, I used my Marine Boot Camp lens as the guinea pig. I like this lens. Plus, it is #799 over-all right now and I’d like to see more traffic come to it from improved search engine placement, which, in turn, should help the over-all lensrank.

Good news – this is what I see for the analysis of my title tag:

Awww shucks, I’m perfect. =)

Optimizing The Description Tag of a Squidoo Lens

The description meta tag gets mixed reviews from the SEO community. This is the meta attribute that would help the search engines decide what to put on the search engine result pages as the description of your site (The words under a search return). Many times a search engine will use a chunk of content that pertains to the query of the searcher, but there are times I have seen my meta description come up.

My two cents: It’s worth doing and takes a few extra minutes to accomplish. Don’t forget, Squidoo gets your meta description tag info from your Intro Module.

The analysis of the meta description of my Squidoo lens says:

Wowzers! I’m still perfect. Oh, I’m gonna get a big head! =)

Keyword Analysis of a Squidoo Lens

Now we come to the keywords meta tag. This is pretty much the ‘disposable’ meta tag these days due to the fact that the search engines will crawl your content and decide for themself what your lens or site is about. However, my opinion is – Why NOT use it? It certainly doesn’t hurt anything and it’s good SEO practice.

Remember where the search engines get your keywords from a Squidoo lens? That’s right, from your tags.

Keyword Analysis of my Squidoo lens:

Uh oh… I’m not ‘perfect’ anymore… haha!

Squidoo SEO Analysis Summary

Spend a bit of time using this free site analysis tool to get your site all with strong green check marks – especially before you more on to OFF-page optimization of your Squidoo lens. Knowing that your lens (or site) is well optimized and search engine ‘friendly’ will be the peace of mind you need to not worry so much about the content, but about doing those off-site things that really help you have improved search engine rankings.

Few Notes about Using that Analysis Tool for Squidoo Lenses:

There are a lot of factors analyzed with that seo analysis tool. For a lens on Squidoo, don’t get all upset if it tells you that you have too many characters. Squidoo allows you to have many more keywords (tags) than a SEO professional would recommend. Also, there is a lot of room in the Intro Module for your meta description info. The intro on a lens tends to have many more characters than I would use to optimize an actual web page. Just keep in mind that Google will only show the first 160 characters, so focus on making those first words keyword-rich and ‘click-able’.

Ok- get to work! In Part 2 of Improve Your Search Engine Placement, we will talk about all the oh-so-important things you can do OFF-page to improve your chances of better search engine placement.