Social media come in all shapes and sizes. When it comes to link-building, however, we give priority to the social media that delivers the most traffic.  Let’s go over the two most important factors that influence search results:  (1.) links to your site from high-ranking pages (2.) creative content.

Squidoo is a social media platform that allows you to create a hub page around a given topic.  That topic can be your favorite artist, books you’ve read, or your business.  People have created Squidoo lenses (another name for Squidoo pages) on nearly every conceivable topic.  The Squidoo site generates a lot of traffic from the web and is constantly referenced as one of the best ways to build links back to your website.

So what is a Squidoo Lens? A Squidoo lens is a webpage built with modules.  These modules enable you to integrate Flickr photos, a blog feed, text, video, and many other features.

As with all social media, you will have to register to the site first.  After you register, you’ll be able to make your first lens.  If this is your first time making a Squidoo lens, we recommend you try the Magic Builder, which is basically a wizard that helps create the page for you.

1. Have a concept behind your lens. The concept I chose for the Tempo Creative Squidoo lens was to aggregate all of Tempo’s companies onto one page, provide information and links to each company, and include the company blogs.  This is a good strategy if your web business has a parent company and several smaller ones.
2. Choose your url wisely; it will appear after http://squidoo.com/yourname.  You can put a keyword in place of “your name” or simply use your business name.  For example, the Squidoo lens for Tempo Creative, Inc. is http://squidoo.com/tempocreative
3. Choose a title for your Squidoo Lens.  When choosing a title, pick something that will grab people’s attention and also give a good description of what the page is about.  The title for the Tempo Creative lens is, “Fun, Creative Web Company:  Tempo Creative”.
4. Pick a category. The category for your Squidoo lens will determine the page style and the modules, but you can always add and delete modules later.  You can also change your category later if you want.  For Tempo Creative, I used the category “business” because the lens is about Tempo Creative, Inc.
5. Add content to your lens. Remember the second most important factor I mentioned is creative content.  So be unique in terms of text.  Make sure the information is relevant, useful to large groups of people, and humorous or interesting.  When creating content for a “business” Squidoo lens, you may have less creative freedom but you can still organize your content in an interesting way.
6. Add images to your content. Everyone likes pictures.  When you choose images for your Squidoo lens, be creative.  Don’t pick stock images that everyone has seen; do a little searching for eye-popping images.  For the Tempo Creative lens, I decided to use caricatures of the people who work at Tempo.  There’s a different caricature for each company owned by Tempo.
7. Use the feed modules. If your company has a feed, use it!  By integrating a feed into a Squidoo lens, you give the page currency.  This is more effective than a static page for directing traffic back to your blog.  For the Tempo Creative lens, I integrated two different blog feeds.
8. Don’t include modules that have no purpose. Always keep in mind with social media, you don’t want to clutter the page.  So only include modules that support your content and help to streamline the information.
9. Add links to your text content. The clear advantage to building a Squidoo lens is the “do-follow” links. “Do-follow” links are the links you put into your Squidoo lens which direct traffic back to your site. In contrast to “no-follow” links, “do-follow” links improve your site’s Page Rank with Google.  To add links to your text content, simply use the html for links:  <a href=”http://tempocreative.com”>Visit our site!</a>

All in all, if you are looking to build links to your website, a Squidoo page is the way to go.  It’s easy, highly searchable, and and effective way to increase Page Rank and traffic.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in “How do I create a Facebook Page?”

Tags: "squidoo lens", "tempo creative", social media, squidoo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 4:41 pm and is filed under social media general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.