seo backlinks Archives - Page 3 of 5 by Mark Murnahan

Are There Any Dumb SEO Questions?

I want to introduce you to Michael Colemire, a Kentucky artist, and newly initiated asker of dumb SEO questions.

I talk to a lot of people about SEO and social media marketing. It is my job, so that makes perfect sense. I answer a lot of questions, debunk a lot of myths, and develop a lot of ideas. I brainstorm with industry know-it-alls, and I brainstorm with people who know little or nothing about these topics, but want to grow their business.

Something I found interesting while I recently visited on the phone with my friend and long-time reader of my blog was that he was afraid of asking dumb questions. His name is Michael Colemire, and he is a very talented sculptor and wood carver. He is not a marketing guy, but he has some great works of art to market, so he wants to learn.

Michael said that the reason he often hesitates to comment on my blog is that he didn’t want to bother me with dumb questions. Also, being such a nice guy, he did not want to feel like he was taking advantage of me. After I picked my jaw back up and thought for a moment, I realized that he had expressed a pretty common and legitimate sentiment. I want to shatter any misconceptions about this.

You see, I have a pretty tricky task of writing a blog about SEO and social media marketing. These are topics which reach people from every different skill level and many different schools of thought about best practices. I try to produce something useful that will cover many skill levels, and that is the trickiest thing.

Why I Want Your Dumb SEO Questions

Reader’s comments are very important to me, because they help me to understand what people already know, or want to know more about. Comments (including “dumb” questions) help to keep me sharp with an appropriate answer, and they give other readers opportunities to look at things from other angles, and cultivate their thoughts.

Let’s take a break for an Internet truth:

A sad truth of the Internet is that it is very easy for people to be selfish. A lot of people will not do something for other people “just because”. It is common that if people think it may benefit you, more than it does them, they will just pass on by. They won’t comment, they won’t retweet it, and they won’t share it on Facebook … unless there is more in it for them than for you.

Something I shared with Michael, and I’ll tell you, is that those “dumb questions” also provide other benefits to me, such as better ranking and recognition in lists that measure a blog’s value to readers. No, it doesn’t pay me money, but it does bring me a bit closer, and it is like a big warm hug and a pat on the butt. I think that every writer needs a pat on the butt and an “attaboy” now and then.

I guess you could say that your comments and dumb SEO questions directly benefit me in a lot of ways, but what about how they benefit you?

Afraid of a Dumb SEO Question or Comment? Think Again!

I know that a lot of people will totally overlook this, but when you add your comment to my blog, it will probably benefit you even more than it does me. This is because when you add your comment, you can add a link to your website, which can have a real benefit to your search engine rankings. It also comes with networking benefits as I described in a recent article titled “Why Disqus May Be The Best Social Network of 2011“,

Do you know what a link from a high-traffic and well ranked blog can do to help your search engine rankings? Well, I’ll just say that it is why I delete a constant flow of spam comments from people who want no more than a link from this blog. Yes, I kill the useless spammy comments, but the legitimate stuff stays here.

Your sincere questions and useful answers deserve to be rewarded, and that reward comes in the form of the number one highest valued SEO treasure there is … a link to your website. Not to mention a great opportunity to network with other readers who may decide you are pretty cool.

One more thing: If you are a super great person like Michael Colemire, I may even credit an article to you.

Thanks for the dumb questions and for taking advantage of me, sculptor and artist Michael Colemire.

What SEO Questions are Dumb?

There are a lot of things which I may think are obvious, but then, this is the work I do every day to earn a living and feed my family. These things are supposed to be obvious to me, after about 15 years in the industry. Let me assure you that they were not always so obvious. I have worked hard and spent a lot of time to develop a solid understanding of my job. Practice makes a world of difference.

I can’t carve or sculpt like Michael Colemire, and I probably never will. If I asked him how to carve a piece of wood into an intricate design, my questions may sound really basic to him, but only because I don’t know the answers.

I guess my point here is that the dumbest questions about SEO are simply the ones you neglect to ask. I would love to say that there are no dumb questions, but I am not ready to commit to that, just yet. I have heard some pretty damn dumb stuff over the years. Most of the questions about the work I do, and the things I write about are just kind of like the questions I would ask Michael. Not dumb at all, just inexperienced.

On the topic of SEO questions, I have listed some of the most common SEO questions, created lists of things people should know about SEO, and have a pretty lengthy blog archive. I welcome you to read these, but in any case, I hope that you will never hesitate to add your comment or question about an article I write. After all, answering questions a primary goal of this blog.

So, what are your dumb SEO questions? Bring it on!

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SEO and Blogs: How Many Blog Posts Should I Have on My Home Page?

The question of how many blog posts to display on the home page of a blog is a pretty tough call for a lot of people. After all, it affects the page load time, the number of generated pages in your archive, the number of pages indexed by search engines, and most importantly, the user experience.

What is the best number of blog posts per page? The answer will depend on a number of things, but I want to offer some food for thought, and share what I have experienced.

If you don’t already have a blog, you may want to sit this one out, but if that is the case, I encourage you to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog“.

As an SEO guy, I am not always right about every SEO topic. I try my best to keep my percentage of being right pretty high, but even I can get it wrong sometimes. It usually happens because of overlooking the obvious things I should be doing, but conveniently neglect.

The reality about SEO is that sometimes the right answers take a little bit of testing. Some people may call it “tinkering”, but that implies doing it without forethought. My suggestion is to stop “tinkering”, but always be testing. In this instance, I do not suggest making frequent changes, so it is good to make your best guess the first time.

Changing Number of Posts Per Page: Think Ahead!

It was not so long ago that I faced the question of changing the number of blog posts per page, on this blog. I had previously displayed ten articles on the home page and on each archive page. It was not a good idea, but then, I get wrapped up in client work and forget about my own stuff. I am often like a cobbler with barefoot children. Once I got around to this issue of blog posts per page, I was really glad to finally address it. I know that others have this question, and in fact, a friend who writes “Social Media Philanthropy” recently had a poll of his readers to see what they think.

Depending on your blog theme, the number of blog posts on your home page will generally be the same number which will be listed in each of your archive pages, too. I don’t mean the kind of archive like my complete archive where I list all of my articles, but rather the pages that are generated for chronological archiving, tag archiving, and category archiving.

If you do not know exactly what I mean, just click on the “older articles” link at the bottom of this page, click on any tag (for example, SEO), or click on a category (for example Marketing). My blog presently lists a total of five articles for each of these types of generated pages, and then has a link to the next page of posts.

Changing the number of posts per page will change other factors of your website, so it is best to think ahead and not do it too often. I will tell you a bit about what it will change.

Changing Blog Posts Per Page Has Multiple Effects

Let’s think about how a change in the number of posts per page will change other things. When my blog displayed ten posts per page, there was the obvious outcome that each page was longer. It makes sense that the potential for keyword phrase matching in a given search engine index may be higher, because of the lengthier content on each page. It also took a bit longer for each page to load, so that was a downside. Plus, consider how daunting a huge long scrollbar can look to somebody just wanting some quick and easy information.

An even greater downside to having large numbers of posts per page is the much lower number of total pages of the blog. More pages can be a really good thing, but of course not just any pages. You can add pages just by adding a bunch of extra blog tags or categories, too, but it is not recommended.

I am certainly not saying that you should go and set your blog to display two articles per page just to bump up your page count. That could be a bad thing. After all, just consider how many times somebody will want to click to the next page, and how annoying that could be. The rule of thumb is that you have three clicks before you lose somebody. Certainly some blogs are much higher, and some are much lower, but it is really important to keep those readers happily surfing on your awesome wave. You do this by having everything just right … or at least as close as possible.

The most important factor is how it will affect the people reading your blog, and not the search engine indexing. If people like your blog, they are more likely to link to it, subscribe to it, and keep coming back. This should always be the primary consideration, but this really can make a big difference in search engine indexing, too.

Fewer Blog Posts Per Page Means More Indexed Pages

This is something I offer with caution. You do not want to aspire to a bunch of frivolous extra pages in search engines. You want search engines to index valuable, useful, and human-worthy content. That is what search engines want, too.

There is a lot of hype on one side or the other about allowing blog tag archives and category archives to be indexed by search engines. There are multiple easy ways to control this, and I use a (highly modified) WordPress plugin called “All-in-One SEO Pack” on this blog. Everything it does can be manually programmed into a WordPress blog, or any other website, but I consider it a handy tool.

A lot of people will argue about the perfect settings, and what to tell the search engines to not index. For example, in my category archive pages, I added the directive for search engines to not index the pages, but to follow the links found within them to other pages. It is in the header of the page and it looks like this:

Example of NoIndex, Follow Directive (click to see it applied):

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”

Against some people’s notion of what works best, I have not included the content=”noindex,follow” directive in my blog tag pages (see example source code). This means that by default, my blog tag pages are being indexed. That is a lot of pages, and when you add up the differences in switching from ten blog posts per page to five blog posts per page, it multiplied the number of indexed pages in search engines. Best of all, it happened without any devious trickery or being spammy to search engines, and it simultaneously improved the user experience.

What About Duplicate Content Penalties?

I know that it is popular for people to wake up sweating profusely after having a nightmare about being penalized by search engines for having duplicate content. Search engines frown on duplicated content, because it has often been used in attempts to cheat rankings. It is the topic of many SEO discussions, and a fright to many bloggers and webmasters.

What is duplicate content? An easy way to describe this is by looking at two given blog tag pages. For example, if you seem my “SEO” tag, it may be significantly similar to the content of my “SEO blogging” tag. I also use the rel=”tag” attribute, but that is another article, and still relatively speculative in search engine recognition, and adherence.

If this gives you sweaty nightmares, stop freaking out, walk to the kitchen, and fix yourself a glass of warm milk (or better yet, Scotch). Then take a calming suggestion from good old Murnahan, and try to get back to sleep. Google and other search engines already have figured this out, and they know how blogs work. Yes, Google and other search engines have this under control, and they have indexed more than just a few other blogs.

It is extremely unlikely that you will be penalized for duplicate content, unless you are doing something to intentionally cheat the system. This is a topic for another blog post, but let me just stroke your hair and carry you back to bed. You will be just fine, and the monster under the bed will leave you alone until another time.

A Summary About Posts Per Page

Every blog is different, and some of us have really long and drawn out content, while others are much shorter articles. I also addressed this in a previous article about whether to use blog excerpts or full-length articles on your pages. The article is titled “Blogging Dilemma: Truncated Blog Excerpts or Full Blog Articles?” It is worth a read if you are on the fence about how to display your blog posts.

Because this can make such significant changes to the number of pages on your website, in your XML sitemap, and number of pages indexed in search engines, I suggest carefully limiting the number of times you change this.

I welcome your input, and if you found this useful or thought provoking, maybe your friends will, too. Please add your comments or questions and pass this along to other fellow bloggers.

What Created the SEO Monster, and Who Keeps Feeding It?

Have you ever been hit by a stroke of Genius, telling you that automated directory submissions will help your ranking in search engine results? Maybe you thought that some nicely crafted meta tags would help your search engine ranking. I may be a bit too hard on people at times, but common sense just completely eludes many people when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). Many website owners want to rank in the top of search results so badly that they will try almost anything. Well, as long as it is cheap, easy, and sounds techie-fancy.

When I started to write this, I was going to rant about automated directory submissions. Then I realized that I have touched on the topic of directory submissions before. I still have something to get off my chest, and I still have something to say about the toxic lies and misinformation that have been created surrounding the SEO industry. It is often fueled by greed and hope of getting something for nothing.

It is easy for liars to make something believable to people who know little about the topic. This has created an ugly monster of the SEO industry.

The SEO Monster Eats, Every Day!

In just the last spin of the clock, I have had several people ask me for information about automated directory submission services to improve their search engine ranking. It reminds me that most people really do not understand SEO. Judging from the glazed look on their faces, I can tell that many people really don’t want to understand. They just want it to magically work. I understand that, and I can imagine how frustrating and stressful it must be for non-SEO people to filter reliable information about search engine optimization through all of the common SEO lies (although this may help: 7 SEO Lies: How to Know When the SEO is Lying).

Outdated, Outrageous, and Downright Dishonest SEO Garbage

There is so much bad information and outdated material spread across the Internet that I think it would frustrate the heck out of me if I was trying to feel my way through it for the first time. What bothers me is how many people are out there trying to earn a buck by selling things that do not help, and even more commonly, severely damage paying customers’ hopes of being found in a search engine.

The world of SEO truly is like a foreign language to most people. They read something about SEO and meta tags, and they think they are on to something revolutionary. It just stuns me that with all of the great information out here on the Internet, how many people are fooled by the first scam they come across.

For some people, I think there is a sense that if it is written, it must hold some truth. Once they find out the hard way that it was a scam and it didn’t work, they either give up and hate everything about SEO, or they take the time to learn the difference and read something sensible and logic-based like “Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference“.

Even in large corporate settings, I have often found people in the role of search engine optimizer collecting a nice salary who got their job just by spouting out a few industry buzz words. The people hiring them are either enamored by their “vast knowledge”, or just give up and offer them a job on blind faith.

A really hard pill to swallow is that most of today’s SEO “experts” have never ranked for anything significantly competitive. That is not a gouge against my industry, and these people are not my competitors. It is a statistical truth. To make this point clear, just have a look at the backlinks to most SEO websites and then see where they rank for the first four words of their home page title. Try this with the website of the SEO who reaches you by email, on the phone, or in a paid advertisement, instead of you finding them through a search.

Productized SEO Services Created a Monster

I think that productizing SEO and selling easy to understand pre-packaged SEO services has created and fed this monster. As an industry, those of us who sell SEO services realized a long time ago that it is much easier to package things up and say “Here is your price, and here is what you get.”

This certainly makes it easier to sell SEO. After all, it is easier for clients to choose from a list and compare it to what others offer. Also, it is a lot more profitable for the SEO to create something once, and sell it many times. The truth is that it is seldom what is best for meeting the customer’s objectives, and it creates a mentality that ranking well in search engines is merely a predefined set of SEO tasks.

This is not to say that things like SEOmoz’s SEO tools, SpyFu, and the squillion other SEO tools are not just great. These are tools, but like a paintbrush, they are only as good as the person using them. A tragedy that happened is when a lot of SEO realized that they could sell far more, and easier, if they promised something such as top ten ranking for “x” number of keywords and then price it and put it in a shopping cart for people to buy. There are countless types of SEO services being promoted with a “buy it now” approach, without any consultation, without any strategy, and with a promise of easy results.

Do you really trust anything that is so easy? OK, rephrase … Do you really trust anything that is so easy in 2011?

Directory Submission Service Example

I started my rant with directory submissions, and I will still use it as an example. “What is a directory submission service?” I hope that is what you are thinking, but in case you did not already know, I will explain it. It is a once-heralded way to automatically submit a website to long lists of search engines and directories, with a hope that it would help search engine rankings, bring more visitors to a website, and boost sales.

I suppose it seems logical to a lot of people that if they use SEO directory submission services to add their website link to a squillion directories and search engines, it will produce magical results. Now let’s clear this up. Seriously, do you think that a magical automated fix like directory and search engine submissions will be your pink pony ride to success?

Oh, and nobody else ever thought of that, so it will be revolutionary! Right? Search engines will suck that up like grape soda and will count all of those backlinks (links to your website) as proof that your website is valuable.

Rub a lamp, sucker! Maybe a Genie will come to your assistance, too.

The Productized SEO Monster Awakens My Inner-Sailor

There are just a few things which make it hard for me to hold back my inner sailor and refrain from dropping severely foul language all over my blog. People falling for things like automated directory submissions and other simple tricks helping their SEO efforts is one of those things. I just don’t think I can even be nice about this. Shit! Call it a temporary case of Tourette’s Syndrome, but this inner-sailor in me is wanting out pretty badly.

People who actually fall for things like this drive me nuts. I just want to say “Hey, Genius, do you want to know the truth, or would you rather waste more money and time to screw up your website?”

If you want the real truth about SEO, slow down, pay attention, and stop breathing those SEO fumes in the air. Spend some time to learn things that will actually work, and will help you to grow your business. For example, those links in the text of this article are not just there for me, and they may help you, a lot. Better yet, here is a link for some relatively easy SEO tips that can save you a lot of time and frustration: SEO Lessons You Should Know.

These tips will not cost you a penny, and will only take a short time to read. Maybe I am just full of hot air, but if so, go ahead and search Google for SEO lessons and see where that link I just gave you shows up in non-advertised, relevance-based organic results. Hint: It is not number two on the list.

I do not write about this because I am seeking a bunch of customers. I only work with a couple clients at a time, and I turn away far more than I work with. Yes, writing about SEO helps people to find me, but it is not just here to help me. This is here to help you.

Just one more thing! Have you subscribed to aWebGuy.com yet?

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SEO and Conversion: Increasing Website Traffic is Only Part of SEO

I write a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) and social media marketing. You expect that, and I am here to deliver. What I think a lot of people interested in SEO do not want to face is that SEO is a lot less about tricky technology issues, and a lot more about producing brilliant marketing.

The industry of SEO is ever-changing, but at the same time, many things are constant. For the largest part, the same things that mattered ten years ago still matter today. There have been many technical changes, but the technical aspects of SEO are not as individually important as some people may lead you to believe. The technology is really just a lot of little pieces which we fit together to assist the larger cause.

Early in the industry of SEO it became popular to chase information on the latest tricks to stay a step ahead of the search engines. Although there were cases when this became valuable, it seems pretty convenient that it is also used for confusing customers in order to seem more valuable. Many absurd yet popular myths about SEO such as meta tags still persist, even today.

There is value in understanding the technologies involved, but the truth is often less popular than myths. The truth is that search engine optimization and the value it represents is influenced a lot more by human response than by a computer. Giving people something which holds value to them has always been the most important part of SEO. This is the truth, and it is backed up with numbers.
Providing value to customers is not just a principle of good SEO, but marketing as a whole. When you give people something of value, they are more likely to share it with others. On the Internet, they often share it with links. In SEO, those links are like votes telling the search engines who should sit at the top as the “President”.

The Best SEO Trick Ever: Provide Value to Others

If you adhere to this one solid principle of providing value to others, your marketing will take a positive turn. A trick I have learned through two decades in the marketing business is that sometimes you must give until it hurts. Getting everything you want may not always work on the time frame you have set for yourself. I have often discovered that this challenge simply means that you are either not giving enough value, or you should have started sooner, and with better research.

Transforming a business from good to great is not simple. If it was simple, every business would have great results and everybody would win.

It is popular these days to award medals and ribbons to every kid in the race, but let’s face it … that will not translate well in the business world. We do not all get ribbons and medals.

Making the best of any market means knowing which people to reach and knowing what they want. It means knowing the customers’ needs and desires, and knowing the best way to solve them. When you take a close look, SEO starts to sound a lot like marketing, which is exactly what it is, but SEO is often viewed at as a technical trade. What many people are hesitant to understand is that SEO is more about producing great marketing in a very competitive atmosphere and less about geeky magic tricks. It requires an understanding of what people want, the unique ways they interact online versus offline, creating an appropriately compelling message, and being able to properly apply technology and mathematics.

SEO is a lot less about programming code and geek stuff than it is about people and psychology.

SEO Meets the Human Factor

The technologies surrounding SEO can help a lot, and increased website traffic is a great thing. I certainly love watching big numbers. I know that big numbers of website visitors will always impress my clients. They really want to see those new visitor statistics, because that is something they understand. What they have a harder time focusing on is that if those numbers do not inspire the conversion of lookers into buyers, or convert their brief message into a lasting one, most of the value is lost.

With any marketing message, there is a right group and a wrong group to deliver it to. It is easy to assume that if somebody performs a given search, they are the right audience for you. This is not always as simple as it seems, and often leads to spending a lot of time and money learning hard lessons. Taking a stronger approach to researching your market reminds me of something my father often advised, which is to “measure twice and cut once.”

Focusing on delivering the right message and presenting that message to the right people leads to higher conversion rates. The research to affect this result is in the top two most important roles of a search engine optimizer, second to getting out of bed.

Getting the research right is what tells us how to reach the right audience and what they will respond to favorably. It gives us the information we need to convert website visitors from lookers into buyers. Secondarily, it tells us how to bring more website traffic based on what people are searching for. Yes, bringing the people is secondary to knowing what they will want once they get there. Why should this concept be so difficult for smart people to grasp? Perhaps it is because they are blindsided by a lot of technical talk and SEO lies.

Educating a client on the importance of increasing conversion by producing a better message based on proper research may sound like an excuse to overlook the traffic numbers, right? This is not the case. More traffic is relatively simple to achieve, when you are actually providing high value based on good research.

The fascination with big numbers has created a culture of promoting valueless junk on the Internet aimed only at bloated traffic numbers. As the importance of traffic volume over traffic value grew roots early, many businesses overlooked doing the things that actually produce revenue. This misjudgment has lead many companies to underestimate the value of the Internet for their business growth. They may have hired SEO services which produced a huge volume of traffic, but then when it did not convert to revenue for the company, they lost faith. More often, they find that the SEO either did not really understand their role, or did not make a stand against the client’s preconceptions of the SEO being just a tech job. It is easy to see how these things could make a company stop trying.

Improving SEO Conversion Means Great Marketing

What can you do to convert more website traffic from lookers into buyers? This is an old question that every good marketer faces. The best answer is usually in finding the right audience. It is always easier to sell a product or service if you are selling to the right audience.

It is commonly accepted that good search engine optimizers who have done their research will know how to get more links by providing useful and compelling content. This will create a lot of website traffic, but that does not always mean the money train is coming down the track. If they are trying to sell tractor tires to race car drivers, they may gain a lot of website traffic, but they will probably have a hard time selling tires.

Good SEO also know, which I suspect a lot of people do not realize about the business function of SEO, is that they must produce reasons for those website visitors to take action and convert into something valuable to the website owner. This may mean a sale, a sales lead, a subscriber, or whatever it is that provides value and purpose to the effort. The first step is knowing who those visitors are and what will compel them to take action. The common tragedy is to get the traffic and then try to figure out why people are not responding.

Traffic quality is an area where it seems that many SEO (the good ones) would like to concentrate on more, but they get their hands tied by the client. The client often looks to the SEO primarily for the purpose of driving more traffic, but then neglect the value an experienced SEO has as a marketer and not just as a part of a tech field. This can create a case where conversion is viewed as secondary to a primary goal of traffic, which is totally backward and often a fast track to failure.

What do you think?

Photo credit to landofnodstudios via Flickr

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Is Squidoo Good for SEO? Likely More Than You Think!

Is Squidoo good for search engine optimization (SEO)? The short answer is “Yes!” The longer answer involves how Squidoo can help to improve your search engine ranking.

First, for the uninitiated, I will explain that Squidoo is a service which allows for creation of topical pages. Squidoo calls each of these pages a “lens”, and the lenses you can find on Squidoo cover a great deal of useful information. Your lens (or lenses) can include any topic you like, and in fact, I have a Squidoo lens just for that. It is titled “SEO, Social Media, and Other Stuff Murnahan Likes“, and it includes RSS feeds from some of my blogs. That means more syndication of my content. This is a good thing, although the RSS links are not very useful from a search engine optimization standpoint. It also includes RSS feeds for commenting services I use, such as my Disqus profile and Intense Debate profile so people can see things I am commenting about on other blogs. It makes a nice aggregation of things I like and things I am up to. The possibilities are vast, and Squidoo has a lot of nice modules that are easy to customize.

Squidoo Helps SEO, But Not How Others May Tell You!

There is a whole lot of speculation and contention regarding the SEO value of Squidoo. Just as with most services with any search engine optimization value, there are many dirty attempts at SEO using Squidoo. This does not mean it is overrun by spammers or that it is not still valuable. I simply point this out because I do not suggest tagging yourself as the next great SEO expert by trying to make Squidoo your platform. It is just another tool, and I recommend being respectful of the Squidoo community.

You may think I try to make the very best use of each tool to improve my SEO. I do enough that people often ask me if I ever sleep, but I do not hold any tool in high enough regard that I would call it my “silver bullet.” There are some social media and social bookmarking sites that I see more benefit from than others, but each of them will have some degree of importance. Squidoo is one of the services I like very much. However, I will openly admit to shamefully under-utilizing Squidoo. Like my father told me, “do as I say and not as I do.” I do as much as my days and nights will allow. As time runs short, we are each guilty of neglecting to do some of the things we know we should be doing. In my opinion, Squidoo is one of those things we should both be doing, and doing better.

Squidoo Backlinks Help SEO

One benefit to Squidoo for your search engine optimization is incoming links to your website (backlinks) from your Squidoo lens (or lenses). I know very well that Squidoo links are valuable for SEO, but in case you are skeptical, I will show you just one way to measure them. I invite you to check the incoming links to this very blog, using SEOmoz Open Site Explorer. If you check my incoming links (yes, click this), you can see that Squidoo is listed with a “Page Authority” of 63 and a “Domain Authority” of 87. That is a worthwhile link, and one which should not be ignored. In the link above, I narrowed the report down to where you can easily find Squidoo in the results. It will look like the image below.

With enough links, such as I have explained here, it does not take long to start seeing better results in search engine results and more link authority for your site.

My SEO tip for you today is this:

Squidoo should not fall into that list of things you neglect. Take the time, today, to give a closer look at Squidoo and judge for yourself.

Squidoo Lenses Rank Well in Search Engines

Another example of the usefulness of Squidoo is of course how well the lenses (pages) rank. There is little mystery about the potential for making a Squidoo lens rank well for a target search phrase. You can often find popular lenses among the top results for popular searches. Although I do not use Squidoo for this in my own internal SEO, I have done so for client projects and witnessed a reasonable level of value in it.

I do not rely on any single SEO tool too heavily, and I do not recommend that you do that, either. There is not a short list of SEO tools and tricks that will make you famously successful with search engines. No, I am sorry, but that list of important SEO tools is long … very long. You should never place all of your SEO energy in only a few places, but instead use a wide range of resources. At the same time, I would submit to you that even if it took you the rest of the day to set up your Squidoo account or to add another Squidoo lens to your existing lenses, your day would not be wasted. By the end of the day, you will have become more efficient using another SEO tool that can give you more visibility to your Squidoo lens, and additional relevant links from Squidoo to your website.

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