I created a few months ago a squidoo account to test squidoo and to try to get some strong lenses for a set of keywords I was targeting. For those of you who doesn’t know, Squidoo is a sort of combination between a knowledge base or a non-collaborative Wikipedia and a community site. In a few words everyone can create an account in a few minutes and start publishing whatever (s)he wants. In practice people uses squidoo a lot to create powerful pages from the seo point of view, pages which rank high on targeted keywords. Theoretically, those pages will pass link juice and traffic by embedding links to your site or can be used to promote affiliated products.

Personally, I think that in most of the cases creating content for other sites than your own is a bad idea in most of the cases, but I think that squidoo is really well done from the seo point of view and it worth to create a squidoo page(squidoo pages are named lenses) just to feel the taste, and to get an idea of what user experience means.

I think there are a few things to contribute to squidoo seo success:

Classic SEO Techniques

• Squidoo is a big site. Large sites tend to go higher because they pass link juice between their pages. The main difference between a large site and a small site is … the size. In a large site you have more related content which links to each other and internal linking does a great job.

• Basic SEO page optimization through title, page, description, meta tags, H1-Hn tags.

• Articles size. Squidoo and similar sites are pursuing their contributors to add more and more content to the same page. Frequent updates and increasing page sizes convince google that something is moving there.
• Internal linking – pages are linked internally to related pages through the tags defined for each lens.
• Long tail keywords.  The recommended title for an article is of 2-6 keywords, recommended by squidoo, targeting this way long tail keywords.
• Simple Url Structure: Squidoo is using a simple url structure in Wikipedia style with no directories or sucategories: www.squidoo.com/article-name.

User experience

From the moment you join squidoo they make you feel your fingers itchy to write something on squidoo. Then they pursue you to update what you’ve written. Then to optimize it. And as you can see below they teach you how.

Squidoo is driving experienced seo contributors to seoptimize their lenses. For each article you write you have a special page where you can check the article health. This is just a seo guide written for dummies who never heard of seo so they can optimize their pages.

The optimization of the lenses includes a section for link building and social media optimization. The authors are encouraged to add links on their blogs to the articles they written and to share the articles on facebook.

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