Word on the street has it that Squidoo is a great place for link building for any site: blogs, niches, and even businesses. - What are your thoughts on using them for an increase in traffic and links?
Don't expect a ton of traffic unless you build a top-ranked lens, but I think it's worth a shot, even if just for a couple links.
Don't publish a lens about your blog (eg: this lens is about my blog, it is really good, go there now to see for yourself). Rather, write an original article about the topic that your blog is about. Then link to it. The search engines will find the fresh original content, and will crawl on through to your blog.
I am also new to squidoo. I have just created 2 lense in the last 3 days. They are getting good traffic from google. To start with we have write informative articles and gain reputation and then go for forwarding that squidoo traffic to our sites. It's a great community resource.
Squidoo ranks well on Yahoo. Pick a decent keyword phrase for the title of your lens and you can end up with it ranking very well in Yahoo - you'll then get a lot of traffic from the lens to your site. Interlink your lenses with other web 2.0 sites like hubpages as well to improve rankings and the SE juice passed to your site.
You can get plenty of traffic if you tag a lens properly and put thought into what words and phrases people are likely to type into search engines when looking for what your site is about. Always use long tail tags as well as single words when tagging a lens. Your lens stats show you what words searchers have typed in to find your lens (and how many people used a particular search term). This can help you to add further quality tags that will bring more visitors to your lens.
I love Squidoo, great way to build backlinks and traffic as long as you properly tag it and have high keyword density. A few lenses might even surprise you, one I wrote expecting to make ~$.2 a month from I'm making ~$50 a month.
the traffic is nice - then again, I have 1+ year old lenses that have aged nicely. Lately, the luck I've had with commissions is falling like a rock as they're nowhere to be seen on Google. I own many (at least 12) PR5 lenses, if PR excites you A few lenses have page 1 and page 2 for some terms, and act as good traffic funnels.
Yahoo is being weird about one of my lenses... it has over 50 links pointing to it that site explorer recognizes, but it doesn't actually index the lens page itself.
12 pr-5 lens , that's great. But I am not sure how pr matters in a squidoo lens. Can you show us some of your pr-5 lenses and what are the link building techniques you employed to get such high pr, thanks.
I tried Squidoo and wasn't too successful with it, but that's probably because I was trying to use it as a money source directly from Squidoo and not from traffic to my website. I might try it again after reading your guys success stories
Does anyone know if Squidoo puts a nofollow tag on outlinks from your lens, like if you create a link from the lens to your main site?
You're right, it does. Squidoo allow you to use basic html to make hyperlinks to your websites or affiliate links from Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare etc. They even have a fairly new module called the 'Big Arrow Link' which helps you to draw some serious attention to your site or affiliate link. If you're interested you can see an example of the Big Arrow Link and an affiliate banner done using html at squidoo.com/sethgodinactionfigure
that's awesome, I hope your clickthru that link would have increased. That's a real attraction, makes me to click. how to do that.
To get the Big Arrow Link module follow these steps. Edit your Squidoo lens and click Add Modules, which takes you to the Module Picker. Click the Sell Stuff tab and you will see the Big Arrow Link listed there. You don't need to use html in this module. The only content you add to it is the web address you want to link to and the words you want hyperlinked.