Welcome to Part 3 of our on-going Squidoo SEO series. In Part 1 and Part 2, we discussed keyword research and On-page SEO. It is now time to focus on our next key element and that is Off-page SEO. I am sure that you must or have seen or read about these ideas a multitude of times on the internet and what I am about to tell you ain’t entirely new. So there is not going to be any magic pill here. This is where the grunt work lies. The blood, sweat and toil of making money online. Of course if you’re already making enough money, you can hire some outsourcers to do this for you or buy some tools to make life easier. But you’ve got to do this.
There’s always a silver lining though. If your topics are in a niche where the competition isn’t too high, then you will be surprised that you will start to rank high in the search engines even without building a single link. That’s the power of the Squidoo domain. Try doing that on your own domain and you’ll realize what kind of punch the Squidoo domain packs in. In some niches you’ll get by with a few links.
But you’re here to make money right – so you gotta go where the money is and where there is more money there HAS to be MORE COMPETITION. At some point or the other in your Squidoo career you will realize that you have to go after some competitive keywords. Everyone loves a challenge.
Off-page SEO is mainly about building backlinks to your lens with your chosen anchor text (keywords that you want to rank for).
Enough talk now and lets get down to business. These are my top 3 favourite methods of backlink building. These are not the only ways – but my preferred ways.
1. Article Marketing
2. Blogs/Web 2.0 properties
3. Social Bookmarking
Yes. Its this simple. Not easy but simple. There’s another one which works well too. Create awesome content that people will want to link to. But that is something I am assuming you will do and again even if we have awesome content, we can’t just sit back and pray that people will start noticing it on their own and start linking to it. We have to set the ball in motion. Once you get your lens out there in public view, if your content is good enough, surely people will want to and will link to your lenses.
Coming back to my favourite methods
1. Article marketing: This simply means that you have to write a great quality article of 300-400 words and submit it to the top article directories. You will have to do this manually when you begin. In fact I recommend that you do, just so that you get the hang of things. Later on, if and when you decide to buy some tools, you will be able to appreciate how much those tools can do for you and whether that is worth the price they are asking for.
2. Blogs/Web 2.0 properties: Starting a free blog today is one of the easiest things to do. So go ahead and do it. Start a niche blog on your lens topic and keep posting short articles from time to time and use good anchor text to link back to your lenses. Relevant in-content links are more powerful that links from article directories which are usually found at the bottom of the article. The popular blogging sites are blogger, wordpress and typepad – just to name a few.Plus there are also other web 2.0 properties like Squidoo which you can also use to create backlinks to your lenses – Hubpages, Bukisa, Xomba, etc.
3. Social Bookmarking: Don’t go too overboard on this. Its not the most effective form of link building but certainly one of the easiest and should be a part of your link building strategies. I use some paid tools now to do my bookmarking – but that’s because I have a whole bunch of lenses and other sites that I need to link to. To begin with I started doing these manually and over time found out a few sites which would help automate this task for FREE. Do check out this blog post about this social bookmarking tool.
VARY YOUR ANCHOR TEXT
This is another golden rule that you must follow in your link-building campaign. Although you will have a few chosen keywords that you want a particular lens to rank for. It is important to vary your anchor text. In my view, you could do with 60-70% of links with main keywords and 30-40% with related keywords. Let me give you an example. Say you’ve built a lens about Chocolate Cake and you are trying to rank for the keywords
• Chocolate Cake; and
• Chocolate Cake Recipe
You will link to your lens using the above phrases as anchor text about 60-70% of the time. For the other links you can vary your anchor text by using other related keywords such as
• Chocolate Cake Recipes
• How to make Chocolate Cake
• Easy Chocolate Cake Recipe
• Homemade Choco Cake
• Simple Recipe for Chocolate Cake
Do you get the drift?
DO IT GRADUALLY
Link building is best done gradually. I don’t want to you spend one marathon weekend where you go on a link building spree and create 50-60 links to your lens in one go. Ideally you would like to mix it up a bit. Keep going steadily. Make a linkbuilding plan and plan out your entire linkbuilding stratregy for a month. Then let go. Keep a tab on your rankings and revisit your lens in a months time. See how your search engine rankings have improved and then go in for a second round of link building. Check back in another couple of weeks.
Yup – I told you, it was simple –but not so easy. The tougher the competition – the more time it will take to get there. But hang in there. Keep a tab on your progress and keep working on it.
The key thing is to keep building those lenses. Once you’re done with an initial round of promotion for a lens – let it take its own course. Go and build a bunch of new lenses in the meantime.
Hope you enjoyed this part. If you have any questions, leave a comment below and I shall be glad to answer your questions.
Our next part will focus on some easy links that you can build within Squidoo itself. Watch out for Part 4. If you have missed the previous parts, check them out here
Part 1 – Keyword Research for Squidoo
Part 2 – On-Page SEO for Squidoo
