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Squidoo As Search Promotion

October 12, 2008 in backlinks, search | No comments

Many of you have heard me talk about Squidoo.com and I expect some of you have actively invested time and effort into promoting your business or organization by building a couple of lenses at Squidoo. But just adding a couple of pages to a service like Squidoo or another free topic builder is not the end of the work.

In the last year I have built over 125 pages or lenses as they are called at Squidoo to test out what was possible, to test out what works and what doesn’t. Squidoo is a good source of back-links for your main website, it seems to get quick ranking and listing in search but unlink an authority site like Wikipedia it may not hold onto a high listing unless you are doing lots of regular updates to your lenses.

I recommend you create your Squidoo lenses in conjunction with your article marketing and satellite websites so that everything is traveling around your main website universe in a smooth orbit. Of course as with all subjects there is a wide latitude in what topics you choose when building lenses at Squidoo.

I’ll use some examples of lenses I recently add to Squidoo. First is my lens for Utterli which is a mobile service for publishing your social media bits. Second is Social Media Tips, a collection of things to do to expand your social media footprint. Third is my lens called Google Search Alternatives, thoughts and listings of search beyond Google. Forth is Micro Blogging and as the name says it is about the joys of Micro Blogging.

Each one of the lenses I list above is tied into SEO and this blog, I use them to add value to this blog and garner authority within search. As you can see the titles of the each lens fits nicely into my SEO universe but each can stand alone. Within this subject there are a multitude of articles I can write, pages I can build on my website and an equal number of external topic pages I can create at sites like Squidoo.

Populate your content universe with many views and colors of a topic, it will garner authority for your business and ranking for your organization.

Alternative Search Solutions

September 17, 2008 in opportunities, search | No comments

Search for many businesses means just one thing, Google. Sure Google is the biggest and baddest engine on the block but it is by no means the only game in town. There are hundreds of niche Search Engines and thousands of niche directories and forums that can help with your business information needs.

Some of the engines aggregate the results from the big 4 and present you with the top results from all the results. Others try and fill a niche by searching only with closely defined parameters. One engine may only get its results from Wikipedia while the next one may only search retail websites for their results.

The key is to be open to information alternatives. Maybe using one of the services that will allow you to build your own search engine might better meet the needs of your clients. Adding focus both to your searches and to the information results can add depth to your organization.

I placed a list of some alternatives to tradidtional search on a Squidoo page entitled Google Seach Engine Alternatives. It also has build your own engine links and some other information you might find useful. Check It Out!

Unique, Useful & Updated

September 4, 2008 in search | No comments

I’m pretty sure I could write about the 3 U’s everyday and still people would not get it. Marketing and Ranking on the search engines is dependent on new and “relevant” content. I stress relevant because if you have a website about Tabouli and you build a new page about Bulldozers it just ain’t going to help. Ok you might build the best one page in the world about bulldozers and Google may reward that page with a ranking of 4 or 5 if you are lucky, but it will do little to raise the ranking of your Tabouli website. It just is not relevant, the subjects clash and neither benefits the other.

So what can you do? You can build new fresh pages that are relevant to your subject and it’s not hard to do. An example is the Tabouli website. Say I want to build a new page every month that gives authority to the main theme of Tabouli, well I could build a page on each of the following subjects. Tomatoes,bulgar,garlic,mint,parsley,cucumber,black pepper,olive oil,chick peas,lemons,pita bread, and great side dishes that go well with Tabouli

Google and the other search engines are in and out of your website all the time. The ranking are in flux all the time, up and down the pages is the fate of your website. So make your pages relevant and always practice the 3 U’s . You can read more at Seth Godin’s blog and download his more indepth view of the 3 U’s Unique, Useful & Updated this cat knows what he talks about.

Change Is Constant

September 2, 2008 in search | No comments

It’s a hum in our heads or it may be following us, we may bump into it going around the corner or trip over it getting out of bed. The “it” is change and try as we might it won’t stop. Large companies like Google or Microsoft seem to put up walls so the only change that occurs is in their control. We know however the change is its own agent and plays for no team nor joins sides even if they are red or blue.

Where I’m going with this rant is to share a recent post from John Battelle on his blog about culture as the agent of change in unseating Google. He recognizes the inevitable and this is remarkable given that society works so hard to have us believe the status-quo is, well, the status-quo. check it out.

More and more search engines pop up everyday and I thought I would share links to 3 of them with you. Snap has been around for a while and seems to have morphed into a search engine that gets people to use it by being everywhere, its SnapShot is an interesting strategy. Wikia Search is from those great people who brought us Wikipedia and it allows for voting and commenting on search results as well as adding URLs to those results. It too is an interesting strategy and surely bares watching and participating in. Finally there is Scour which uses MSN, Yahoo and Google results in a simple aggregation scheme. What might set it apart from other aggregates is allowing voting on results and in collecting points for searching that can be redeemed for merchandise. Like Wikia Search, using and being involved in Scour may produce some benefits to you and your business.