Squidoo Lens Review | No Traffic From Google Part 3

That darn Google! If Google won’t send traffic to your lens, it sure makes it difficult to have a successful and profitable Squidoo lens, doesn’t it? Y’all may remember Jackie Lee. Jackie sent me an email requesting my help for a Squidoo lens she was having issues with. Yahoo! loves her lens and sends it regular traffic. However, Google was not cooperating. While Google had her lens in its index, the lens was ranking for nothing in the search engine result pages. The only way to find Jackies lens was to do a direct search for her url. Even an EXACT search for her lens title was not returning HER lens.

This was an interesting situation to me, and also one that I feel quite a few lensmasters on Squidoo run in to. This prompted me to create some posts here on PotPieGirl.com to talk about this situation with Google and a Squidoo lens…and what can be done about it.

Help! No Traffic from Google to My Squidoo Lens!

In part one of the posts about a lens not getting traffic from Google, we did some basic research and trouble-shooting of her Squidoo lens to see what was going on. We found out that while Jackie’s intended niche, cloth baby diapers, was a good niche in Google, it was also a VERY competitive niche within the Squidoo site. Being that Google will usually only show two results from the Squidoo site for a chosen keyword, we had to figure out a way for Jackie’s lens to get “picked” by Google, and ranked in the Google search engine for her chosen keywords.

When we continued talking about solving this seo issue of no traffic from Google to a Squidoo lens in part 2, we SEO analyzed two of Jackie’s competitors in Squidoo that Google WAS ranking for her related keywords. Then I gave a list of suggestions that Jackie could make to the lens to help remedy this situation.

Jackie made the suggested changes I offered, and today… just 10 days later… I received a wonderful email from Jackie.

“My Lens is on Page 2 of Google!”

Hey Jennifer,
Just thought I’d let you know I’m page 2 on google for free cloth diaper pattern and page 6 for cheap cloth diapers. WOW. I just have to say thank you again!! I’ve only seen 6 visits from google, but I have learned so much I’ll know how to better put a lens together (and teach others) to make sure they come up on google from the beginning. If you have any other hints I’d be glad to hear them. 🙂

 

Jackie
The Natural Pregnancy Project ~
9 Months of Natural Pregnancy and Childbirth Research In One Place
www.InternetMarketingForMommies.com

Yippeeeee! So glad those few changes made such a big difference. Now we’re on to something and can really get this lens moving up in search engine rankings.

I did some quick checks on Google to see if the issue with Jackie’s lens was really corrected, and looks like it is!

The first time I ran this exact search for Jackie’s lens, I could NOT get Google to show HER lens. Other lenses that had “lensrolled” her were ranking, but Jackie’s lens was NOT.

Now look:

There she is… #1!!! And you also probably notice that is my blog, PotPieGirl.com, ranking at #3 and #4 for that search, too. haha! Go ahead and try and tell me that simple ON page SEO doesn’t work! =)

And here she is for one of her targeted keywords!

This is GREAT news and shows real promise for getting this Squidoo lens boosted in Google with some good off-page promotion. Off-page SEO works best when your Squidoo lens, or web site, is ALREADY ranking in the search engines.

Off -page optimization helps improve search engine placement….but not if you aren’t ranking at all (AND you ARE indexed). A nice round of article marketing could do the trick for this lens as well as other off page SEO for Squidoo lenses. Maybe I’ll get my ‘secrets’ together and do a good reference post for ways to promote and OFF page optimize a Squidoo lens. I’m always testing and tweaking the various tools that are available…

Speaking of ‘testing and tweaking’ off page optimization techniques – I’d like to give a word of warning about using social bookmarking sites that ‘take’ ALL your content. When you give your entire exact content from a web page to another site, you may very well lose YOUR ability to rank for the keywords that content relates to – especially if that bookmarking site has a higher Page Rank than you do. When you ‘give’ your content to another site (or when you allow full RSS feeds of your site go out on the web), you are doing what is called “syndicating your content”. Use caution when doing this.

Squidoo Optimization Tip –

 

Do not use any social bookmarking site that you can NOT change the title tag to.

Optimally, choose sites that allow you to write a unique description AND a unique title when bookmarking your content.

Squidoo Tips and Optimization Lessons

For those that are interested, here are some previous blog posts to help you create better SEO optimized Squidoo lenses:

How to Create a Squidoo Lens

How to SEO Optimize a Squidoo Lens

How to Improve Search Engine Placement of a Squidoo Lens (part 1)

Topics that Squidoo will NOT Allow

Squidoo Lens Review

Well, looks like this Squidoo Lens review was a success! I would like to thank Jackie Lee for being the “guinea pig” and being so gracious through-out this whole process.

You’re a good sport, kid!

Squidoo Lens Problems

Do you have a lens that is having issues or needs some trouble-shooting? If so, send me an email (potpiegirl(at)potpieworld(dot)com) and tell me what’s going on with your Squidoo page. If I think I can help, and the lesson will help my readers, I just might feature YOUR lens for a future post.