Why Squidoo?

Every time I go back to Squidoo I find something new. I probably can’t cover everything in this article.

Building a Squidoo lens is like making a mini blog that exists on one page. It’s basically a landing page for any niche you wish to write about. Basically it can be an extremely targeting web page about whatever you want it to be about. You can even create multiple lens’ to basically link them all together.

But why? Well for many bloggers building links to your blog can be difficult, but it is also very important. The more links that you have the better your website will rank in Google, and for the terms you want.

For example, I made a Squidoo Lens about free samples. In the lens I put links to my own blogs, as well as displayed their RSS feeds and put a bit extra ways for me to make money.

For every Google Adsense click, Amazon Sale, eBay sale, I get my own bit of commission for it. As well, I put my own affiliates on my lens to give me 100% of whatever I can get sign-ups for. If you haven’t taken advantage of Squidoo lens’ for affiliate marketing, you just might want to.

Squidoo is Easy!

I was surprised at how easy Squidoo is. Blogger took me a bit to master, but it is pretty easy as well. You can start a blog and publish an article in a few minutes at blogger. With Squidoo it’s even easier. You can have an entire lens finished in 5-10 minutes after a bit of navigating around.

There are different modules you can incorporate into your Squidoo Lens to make it interactive. One of my favorite Squidoo Lens’ is about online contests. There you can submit your own contest or even a contest blog if you want to. I’ve used this function on my own Squidoo Lens and allow visitors to add their own free samples.

Squidoo Referral Program

I didn’t even know Squidoo had an affiliate program until after I joined! It’s not much, but if you can refer people and they earn money, you can get money too. When your referral earns its first $15, you AND your referral will each get $5.

Basically it’s incentive enough for you to join as my referral so we can both earn $5!

Sign-up to Squidoo.

Squidoo Wrap Up

While writing this article I got inspired to create a few more lens’. The possibilities and topics for Squidoo are endless. You can build links to your niche sites, as well as earn a bit of income doing it. I definitely plan on keeping updates posted about how am I doing with my Squidoo. If you are already on Squidoo make sure to comment on my free sample lens and point me to your lens’. We can exchange ratings as well as favorites and fans.

If I haven’t convinced you to join, maybe Janet can. She has the #1 lens on Squidoo. She writes about how shes made money with Squidoo. From June 4th to July 10th she’s made $483 on Squidoo alone, not including her affiliate commissions. Check out her lens, but make sure to come back and join as my referral!

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For those who dont know, Search Engine Strategies (SES) is an expo that educates participants about search engine marketing, SEO, advertising strategies and tactics. They always have the top experts in the field giving presentations and more.

There are tons of websites that we use everyday that will be representing their site. Of course Google and Yahoo, but also sites that I’ve mentioned here like Hydra Network and Pepperjam.

Getting an expo pass is free in advance but $50 on site. You can read about all the swag that Ryan Weidman got last year. Not bad!

However if you want to do participate in the conferences, traning or sessions it runs to almost $2,000. If you buy before August 1st you could save as much as $200.

Whos going to San Jose?!

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Blog Directories

A cheap and easy way to build links any blog or website is to list them in directories. This often leads to one way links to your website which is very beneficial to you. You may not get much traffic from the directories themselves, but instead from the search engine visitors. I don’t find directories as important to blogs like this one, however if you are looking to build a specific niche blog, it can be crucial to your SEO success.

You can find a list of 40 free blog directories at Mikes Money Making Mission, just to get you started. These directories have page ranks from 7 to 0. Each directory is different, some may not be right for you.

Get Listed at Bloggeries

One directory not mentioned in that list is Bloggeries. Bloggeries main page is a pr6, that is basically a one stop shop for blogging. There is of course the directory, as well as the forum and blog. The blog consists of reviews of all sorts of blogs, you can see ours here.

The Bloggeries Directory has the front page as a pr6, with categories all with different PR. The higher the pagerank, the more powerful the link to your website is (that generally holds true).

To be listed you can pay $34.99 for a permanent regular listing, that includes three deep links to your website or blog. Or you can have your website/blog featured, for $49.99 annually.

We just got listed in the Bloggeries directory. Make sure to vote for us.
Earn Money Promoting Bloggeries

Rob from Bloggeries is a great guy to have in your corner. He’s all about helping out bloggers and opens his forum to everyone, as well as his directory. He’s looking to help bloggers earn money with his new affiliate program. For everyone you refer to the directory, you will earn $20 per directory “sale”.

On top of that for every affiliate you refer, you earn $5 per every sale that they make.

The affiliate program was just announced a few days ago, so you can get in early and refer some other bloggers into your tier. Sign-up now to get approved and start promoting.

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With that being said, using the site itself to get links, may not be the best idea.

It is a massive forum, meaning there are tons of members. Due to it being so big, some users abuse it. You can’t stumble your own Digital Point threads since it is banned from Stumbleupon. Linking to your website, blog, or article from Digital Point may also give you penalties in Google.

De-Ranked from Google

When we had our trouble with NeverBlueAds (which is now resolved) I, of course, posted about it. That post ended up ranking on page 1 in Google for the term NeverBlueAds.

I found a thread on Digital Point discussing NeverBlueAds so I put in my two cents and linked to my article. Soon after that I realized my traffic from Digital Point was increasing but the search traffic for NeverBlueAds went down. After Googling it, I found the post was no longer ranked on page 1. Going a bit deeper I found I couldn’t find the post at all.

Figuring Digital Point may be the culprit, I tried to edit my post to remove the link. However you can’t seem to edit links that old, so I had to change the URL of the post all together. Within the next few days the post was back where it belonged, on page 1.

Linking to Digital Point?

I’m not sure what the affects could be for linking to Digital Point, however I make sure to no follow links, just in case.

Have you noticed this too with your posts? Several of our other posts have been affected due to links from DP

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S.E.O.

Three letters that everybody is going crazy over on the internet. Do this, don’t do this, and people will come streaming in from search engines willing to throw cash and ladies at you.

Sorry, I don’t agree with it.

With blogs, whilst SEO is important, in the majority of niches you should really focus on your readers rather than search engine positions. Guys like John Chow rank nowhere in search engines. So how can he make $30,000 a month?

Simple, by writing for readers (or – in his terms – getting other people to write for his readers).

Here are some things I’ve noticed which you could be doing wrong. Well, they’re not wrong, but I find them offputting as it reads to me like you are putting search engine’s first.

Overly SEO’d titles
Titles shouldn’t be 3 or 4 lines explaining exactly what you are doing in the article. Titles should be brief, clever and eye catching. Whilst Titles are crucial for SEO purposes, a long title may not only appear offputting for readers, but also get you penalised in search engines.

Furthermore, if your page has more than 1 h1 tag on it, there’s a chance that the second one will be ignored. H2-H6 tags are there for a reason.*

Confusing Internal Backlink Structure
Everybody’s seen those blogs with random words linked for Search Engine Optimisation benefit. People will follow them, and Google will follow them. People will be confused, and google will give you a slight benefit. Sure, link to your own stuff, but it should either be a lead in (such as “I wrote about Search Engine Optimization here”), or even a simple “Click Here”. Just don’t confuse your readers.

Getting Rubbish Rank Instead of Real Readers From Forums
This is a lesson that I learnt recently whilst promoting Retro Garden. To aid promotion, I joined a bunch of video game and retro game forums to participate in discussions there. Immediately I put my forum signature as a keyword rich link. I didn’t see any benefit. I changed to an image based signature and – whilst losing on search engine traffic, I got more clickthroughs and readers.

Not all forums allow this, but if you see other people use images in footers, why not you use one too, especially if you contribute?

So it sounds like I don’t do any SEO on my blogs. You couldn’t be further from the truth, I do SEO on my blogs, but I’m not SEO for the sake of my readers.

You got any S.E.No-No’s to share with the group?

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What Exactly is SEO?

When I first started blogging, I didn’t even know what SEO was.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.

The better your website is prepared and “optimized” for search engines, the more traffic you should get. Here is how you can improve your blog and start using basic SEO methods to improve your rankings.

Change the URL Permalink Structure

It’s important for your blogs URL to include at least the post title. Basic Wordpress default settings give your blog, example, “yourblog.com/p=1″. This not only hurts your SEO, but makes your blog look unprofessional. You can customize your post URLs to have whatever you like.

To change the settings, go to your Options tab in the Wordpress dashboard. Then select permalinks. To have your post link just have the post title, go to custom and enter /%postname%/.

I recommend to do this very early with your blog. By changing the URL structure, your blog will need to be re-indexed for the right URLs. If I changed my permalink structure now, people searching my blog would get errors because the URL for each post would be different.

Install the All In One SEO Wordpress Plugin

This is an essential (and easy) Wordpress plugin for any blog. This plugin allows you to perform basic important SEO techniques with your blog. You can change the title and description to whatever you want. This is what the search engines will see. You can also tag your post with keywords which is also very important for search engines.

If you haven’t downloaded the All in One SEO plugin, you can do so here.

Blog Your Key Term

Pick relevant key terms for your blog and use them. The obvious best way to start ranking for the key terms you select (at least longtail) is to blog about them. Make sure to include the key terms in your title, post and tags.

My post, 10 Quick Blogging Tips, helped me start ranking for “blogging tips” and other key phrases similar to that.

Build Links With Your Key Terms

To get better rankings for your key terms you need to promote it. I’ve had bloggers link to this blog with keywords like blogging tips and blogging tools. I’ve used this technique for link exchanges and leaving comments.

Of course the alternative is to buy links. However this can be costly. You also don’t want to go and get 1,000 links within the same key term in one day. This could ultimately ban you from search engines, or for that particular term. SEO can be a slow process, but rewarding.

Comment on Blogs – Do Follow / Top Comments

Commenting on blogs can not only drive traffic and subscribers to your blog, it can also help with basic SEO.

By commenting on blogs with “do follow” or a top commenter list, you can build easy links with whatever key term you chose. This is how I gained better rankings for key terms like increase website traffic and blogging tips.

An important rule here is to NOT SPAM. All the comments I left were on-topic and provided value to the article and comment section.

Courtney Tuttle has the infamous Do-Follow List where you can find tons of blogs that give you SEO juice. There are over 200 websites/blogs that are now on the “D List”.

How have you incorporated basic SEO into your blog?

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Every day millions of people search for solutions to their tech support problems. This is a golden opportunity for you drive new visitors to your blog. Simply write a post detailing a computer problem you are familiar with and offer up the solution. Post it and forget about it while the Google crawler works its magic on your behalf.

Here’s a real world example from my own blog. Almost a year ago I ran into a problem with an Access database. I eventually realized the problem was with an Internet Explorer setting (of all things) so I wrote a short 100 word post about it called Access Files Located on an “Untrusted Site” and moved on with my life.

Lo and behold, over the course of a few weeks my post slowly rose in the ranks of Google searches. As of today, it’s on the first page of results for a variety of searches related to Access and “untrusted site” error messages. The post receives new and unique visitors each day from search engines. I’ve since gone on to write a number of posts containing tech support solutions that now account for about 40% of my incoming traffic.

This idea doesn’t require you to write long posts or have a lot of technical knowledge. A lot of these problems and their solutions can be found online already. Just keep these two things in mind when writing your post:

• Be smart about your post title. Use keywords you think people will use in their search results. It’s a good idea to use words or phrases from any error messages the problem contains if possible.
• Keep your description of the problem and its solution clear and concise. People want a fix for their problem and not more confusion and frustration.

Helping people solve their computer problems is a simple way to generate natural traffic to your blog. In fact, you could probably start a brand new blog offering nothing but fixes and solutions for any software package on the market today and have traffic rolling in. It just takes a little patience as the search engine spiders crawl and index your posts.

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SeoMeter

Add your website to SeoMeter, and start to keep track of search engine’s crawling!

SeoMeter allows you to monitor when search engine’s crawl your website or blog. Getting listed is free and the tool records in the database how often you get crawled.

You can see on our badge that our CC or crawl cycle is .9. The CC is the time between two consecutive crawls done by search engine robots. So if our crawl cycle was 1, that means we get crawled once a day.

You can also notice our rank, which I thought was pretty cool. You can check out the top 20 websites in blogging. Looks like we are in the top 5.

Why Does this Matter?

SeoMeter puts it simply and states that this

“allows webmasters to monitor their website’ crawling activities, and to collate crawling trend against their ongoing marketing campaign and other SEO strategies.”

However, I’m just more fascinated on graphs and how much the trends change over time. This gives you different things to check your experiments. Maybe you start posting more or less. It could affect your search engine referrals.

What determines search engine’s crawl rate is best outlined at the SEOmeter blog. The factors include content updates, pinging, sitemap, robots.txt and server speed.

How often do you get Crawled?

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Search Engine Optimization

SEO can be done by simply writing a post with optimizing your titles. We rank very well for posts that were made months ago, some aren’t even relevant to our blog. Before Spiderman 3 even was released, we made a post with an image. That image continues to generate a few 100 searches per month.

The most difficult thing to start with is to figure out which keyterms are right for your blog. You have to be realistic and think which terms will get you the most traffic, that are attainable. We’ve chosen keywords that include blogging, such as blogging tips and blogging tools. For several of our keyterms we’ve been able to reach pages 1-3, which also helps us rank for the longtail keywords.

Pay Per Click

This is the more costly effort, however it can drive the most traffic based on your budget. When using PPC management you want to drive traffic to your website or post that will in turn make you money. Whether it’s a post with an affiliate program, or ads that pay.

This works well for specific niche sites when the amount you get when an ad is clicked is high. By starting with a smaller budget, you can figure what earns you money and what doesn’t.

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In our day to day blogging we link out to several sites. Search engines follow these links (unless you specify rel=nofollow tag) and assumes you give a positive vote to the site you have linked to. Likewise, other sites link to your site as well. Depending on the quality of the site you are linking to or the site linking to you, your search engine ranking can be affected.

So, how do you go about checking for good links and bad links in your blog?

Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker

This excellent tool scans the url you provide and checks for bad links and flags problem areas in your site. After it has scanned all the links in your site, it shows the total number of links, number of unique links and number of questionable links.

Here are a few things this tool shows:

• Link Density: It refers to the number of links in a single page. A high number of links (over 100) in a single page will be looked at as a red flag according to Google Webmaster Guidelines.
• Bad Neighborhood Warning: The tool shows a warning if your blog has an anchor text in a link to a usually spammy industry like sex, gambling or pharmaceutical. This is probably just a false warning. For example, my post titled ‘Check for Sex offenders in your area’ threw a warning flag even though it was a genuine post.
• Blog Spam: If a page you have linked to is in a domain which is appearing as a link from a lot of blogs, it could be indicative of blog comment spamming. My recent link to buymybrokenipod.com was flagged with this. In fact, my links from Blog About Your Blog is flagged as Blog Spam by this tool as I contribute as an author as well as a commentator quite often.
• 404 Not found: A handful of these isn’t usually a problem. To a search engine, a site that returns a lot of 404 errors would means lower trust factor. So, you may need to check the 404 errors in your site and correct the errors.

As you can see, this tool is not 100% fool proof but it can give you a very good overall idea of who you are linking to and how a search engine spider will look at your blog. For eg. my archives page has links to all my previous posts and shows 306 links. I had previously used robots.txt file to stop the bots from spidering this page but I’ll have to recheck if it’s still working.

Also, check out my previous post on Free tools to Check the Health of Your Blog.

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous and incremental process. Tools such as the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker can be a great addition to your toolbox that help with making your blog a little bit more optimized.

I would love to hear about any other tools you use in the pursuit for SEO nirvana! Drop a comment below if you have one.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la – where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable. (RSS)

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