Squidoo is a free platform that should be definitely be utilized by any business as one aspect of their various marketing strategies. This web 2.0 site gets a lot of love from Google, and the pages created on the site (\”lenses\”) rank easily and very quickly in Google – often as soon as a few hours.

If you have never used Squidoo before, you will be pleasantly surprised when you discover how extremely simple it is to create and publish your first Squidoo Lens. For those who have no HTML knowledge or have never built a webpage, a lens can be created in a few short steps without any technical skills.

One of the most important aspects to creating a lens is to choose an attractive headline which will be your \”URL\” on the web. This headline must contain your desired keywords; it cannot be changed once it is created. Local business names are a great choice and can rank very easily, with little competition.

Once the title/headline is created, it is a simple matter to add content by adding what are called \”modules\”. You simple select these, and reorder them any way that you like by dragging and dropping them. For a business, inserting a few text modules, a video module, links, RSS Feed and a guest book at the end are the best choices. Text modules allow you to set out details about your business, including a short introduction, a summary of what you do and the products or services you offer.

Videos are heavily viewed by visitors, and if you have a short video about your business, this can definitely attract visitors. The link module can assist in directing visitors to your lens back to your website. RSS Feeds allows your visitors to \”subscribe\” to your lens and more importantly, allows you to submit your lensmaster RSS to RSS directories. The guestbook at the end is an excellent way to receive feedback from your visitors and allows you to interact with them.

Once your lens has been built, you should revisit it at least once every few weeks and try to update the content to keep it \”fresh\”. Traffic to your lens is not going to explode immediately, you will need to do some work in the background with some marketing strategies such as backlinking or outsource that work if you are not sure what to do. Some of the background work involves posting to free ad blogs with your targeted keyword (linking back to your lens), and commenting on various blogs in your niche that have a \”Commentluv Plugin\”.

Once your lens has been published, the next step is to check to see if you are indexed in Google. Of course, you should wait about one day before you try, but here are the steps. First, go to your lens and copy the URL onto your clipboard. Next, go to Google.com and in the search box, you will type site:yourlensurl (here it says \”your lens url\”, paste in the url). If you see your Squidoo lens in the searches returned, you have already been indexed. If you cannot find it, then you have not yet been indexed.

Squidoo works hard to keep all of the lenses listed in their directory completely spam free. This is why it is very important to provide some good information when you create your lens. If you are planning to simply throw up a lens that is just an ad \”in disguise\”, then it won\’t be accepted by Squidoo. This is how they ensure that they remain an authority site on the internet, and it is also why Google loves their content.

While you may see some lenses that you would consider \”spam\”, they certainly do not last long on the site. Lenses are regularly reviewed by visitors and staff alike, and if your lens is not up to snuff, you will receive an email notifying you that your lens will be deleted if you do not make immediate changes.

As far as marketing strategies go, Squidoo is here to stay. Due to the fact that the lenses receive such high rankings in Google and get you to page one on Google, they have become and remain an extremely popular way to get people a lot of high quality and more importantly, free and natural traffic. The starting point is to make sure you have a good set of keywords to work with, and then to develop your content and ideas from those.

Peter Geisheker is the CEO of The Geisheker Group marketing firm found at
http://www.geisheker.com.

Peter Geisheker is the CEO of The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm http://www.geisheker.com.

Author Bio: Peter Geisheker is the CEO of The Geisheker Group marketing firm found at
http://www.geisheker.com.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: squidoo marketing