5 SEO Tips From Squidoo Lensmasters

Squidoo is a great place. You can create your own free websites, earn money for you and for charities, and connect with other Squidoo users, called lensmasters on the Squidu forum. For today’s post I was lucky enough to get five SEO tips from three of Squidoo’s most prolific lensmasters. These tips apply for Squidoo lenses, but also for your blog or website.

The first two tips are from the lensmaster Sojourn. One of my favorite lenses by Sojourn is her lens on HTML Borders and Backgrounds.

1.) Using images with properly formatted and descriptive alt tags can help gain search engine traffic. It’s surprised me on several occasions that an image I’ve used has ranked higher for my keyword than my article, post or lens itself. People love images and they get a lot of clicks. Make sure they’re relevant and attractive.

2.) Use your main keyword phrase in the first few sentences of your article, post or lens and put it in bold text. This is often the description that will show up in Google beneath your site listing. First, using bold text helps search engines know more about the topic of your content. Second, having the phrase in your first few sentences should cause it to be included in the Google description in bold because it matches the searcher’s search term. This can help your listing stand out from others, even if it’s not in the first position on the search engine.

Pixelrage gives us our next SEO tip. One of my favorite lenses by Pixelrage is his lens on sites for DoFollow links. You can also checkout his Ramblings of an Internet Marketer blog. This SEO tip is often overlooked by many webmasters.

3.) Most people forget to go back to their oldest works and “nofollow” many of the links in their content. For instance, your 5+ year old web pages or even your oldest Squidoo lenses most likely have many links on them that are still Dofollow – especially worthless links that point to Adobe Acrobat downloads, Wikipedia pages, PDFs, affiliate links and social bookmarking sites or profiles. Once you “nofollow” them, you may see significant boosts in page strength, and ultimately, a page that may jump in search engine results. My simply putting in the rel=”nofollow” snippet within the hyperlink code, you’re blocking any valuable link juice from leaving the site.

Our fourth and fifth SEO tips are from Katinka Hesseling, known as ‘Spirituality’ on Squidoo. Two lenses you may like by Katinka are her SEO Squidoo lens, and her SEO Mentor lens. She has also recently started a blog and created an ebook about Web promotion and SEO called Marketing Spiritual. Katinka’s tips involve two SEO essentials that need to be done with the basic coding and content of the website or in the lens workshop on Squidoo.

4.) Well, on any website what’s important is to make sure the title tag contains the proper keywords and is phrased in such a way that searchers will click on it. On squidoo and hubpages this simply means that the title of the hub needs to contain the keywords. Outside such platforms it often means that people have to customize their CMS (wordpress for instance) to FIRST put the title of the post, and THEN the title of the blog – if the latter is mentioned at all. On wordpress I use the SEO plugin for this see: http://www.squidoo.com/wordpress-plugins-thanks

5.) it’s always important to interlink your online publications that are related in topic. And on ‘about’ pages it’s quite suitable and advisable to link to unrelated pages as well. On blogs this can mean using tags and related pages plugins.

These are some tips that we can all do. Do you have any tips that you would like to add to the list? If so, feel free to leave a comment below.