Squidoo for SEO (Is it worth it?)

Who knows whether this will turn out to be a useful platform or not ? And if it does, who knows how long it remain useful for? Squidoo is, according to good old Wikipediaiknowbloodyeverything:

“Squidoo is a community website based in Irvington, N.Y. that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Lenses are interactive, and can contain Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Squidoo is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world, and in the top 250 most viewed in the United States. It has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity.”

So they’re popular, useful and they don’t  ‘do’ evil if their charity donating credentials are anything to go by. But can you use Squidoo for SEO?

I have had Squidoo on my ‘to do’ list for as long as they’ve been around. Vowing to give it a good going over at some point to see if it might be of benefit to me or my clients as either a branding, PR, SEO or similar tool. But never seemed to get around to it.

Squidoo is Seth Godin’s baby and I have a lot of respect for Seth. I’ve read quite a lot of his blog entries and books over the years and his ideas are generally sound (if a little broad) and with a little imagination and common sense his notions can be applied with favourable results.

Thus the idea of Squidoo being a ‘nowblog’ named after a squid (with it’s large eye lenses) and the ‘oo’ coming from the names of companies such as Google & Yahoo having ‘oo’ in them and them being successful companies is fun, compelling and easy to engage with. So I thought I’d have a look.

From an SEO point of view I wanted to see whether there was any benefit to creating a popular, ontopic lense that could be used to channel both traffic and link juice to pages I’m targeting for SEO. Case in point is my client John C Wilkins in Bolton. They are a soundproofing (yeah, I know) products supplier and to cut a long story short we have started working on various pages within the domain that we want to rank for specific terms. So my first lense on Squidoo is all about a topic that is relevent to what they do and genuinly useful and informative: How to Soundproof a School

The idea is that this will be one of several lenses all based around the central theme of soundproofing with some good content and some strategic anchor text links with the objective being to raise the rank of my client’s pages in G.

The first part of that is pretty straight forward and we have full control over the content, it’s usefulness and it’s popularity. That’s our job. The second part though, the linking issue is a little foggier. Unlike the Flickrs before it, the Squidders haven’t decided to combat the obvious potential for spam with the use of ‘nofollow’ tags on outbound links that you control. Sweet. Potentially.

But does that mean that Google have already devalued links coming from Squidoo lenses thus eliminating the need for nofollow to do that job for them and thus allow Squiddo the perceived quality of link freedom? Maybe.

It would make sense that links from sites such as Squidoo or buzzle or ezinarticles would be devalued. G knows what these sites are all about. They dofollow links and can clearly be spammed. Or can they? If writing content purely to gain a ranking benefit in Google is against G’s “Webmaster rules you must obey you SEOing scum” then some there’s some very very good content out there, genuinely appreciated by people and having absolute value that should be penalised, because that’s what we do isn’t it? We try to write stuff that will rank well or provide some strong,  on topic links and try to make it genuinely useful content so it’s read, linked to and ‘on topic’.

I’m digressing though. The point is, will Squidoo help me to rank or not. Some say yes and some say no. Google may or may not devalue links from here to a more or lesser degree (probably a bit) but surely the on topic nature of the page can counter that? And surely if the lense itself is strong and it’s own inbound links confirm the quality and theme of the content then it’s a useful vehicle for link (and traffic) building.
I’ll tell you what, I’ll try and find out shall I? Feel free to share any Squidoo thoughts or experiences…

A 22% Conversion Rate Case Study

Conversion rate is a pretty subjective metric. 80% might be considered underachieving if the goal you are measuring is how many website visitors have signed up for free chocolate but 5% could be very well received by a retailer of a very highly marked up product in a seriously competitive market.

But subjective or not, it is probably the most important measure of whether you are achieving relative success in the 2 most important elements of your website:

• Are you driving qualified, targeted traffic to your website?
• Is your website doing everything it can to convince visitors to take a prescribed action?

Answering ‘yes’ to those 2 questions is invariably qualified by a steadily increasing conversion rate. With that in mind I wanted to examine the successful ingredients of a recent project that have combined to achieve a healthy 22% conversion rate for one of my clients.

Geneva to Morzine airport transfers (Shameless – I know…) are what Geneva2Morzine.co.uk sell. They wanted a simple, cheap website that would help them to book their service out via the web.

Now, this isn’t an SEO client and we haven’t even really looked at that yet so this is not about ranking in Google for a relatively low competitive phrase set but about best practice in productivity.

Here are the basics from the last month:

• The top search terms used to drive traffic to the site via Adwords
  • geneva transfers
  • transfers geneva to morzine
  • geneva to morzine transfers
• The landing page headline: Door to door transfers to and from Geneva Airport to Morzine, Avoriaz and Les Gets
• Some simple and honest service information
• A great big, impossible to miss call to action: Click here to talk to us about Airport Transfers or get a Transfer Quote

That’s pretty much it. Nothing sexy or glam or funky going on at all – just a few relevant, targeted elements designed expressly to meet the expectations of the visitor based on their search. It helps that it’s a niche market but I think it’s a great example of productivity over style; of not forgetting the goal of the site. Or as Lynsday Camp would say “Remember the reader and the result”.

It’s always good to get back to basics because it’s so easy when working on larger, more complex projects, to seek out larger, more complex solutions when simple relevancy is so often the more elegant and productive way to go.

It’s all about the visitor. They have expressed their need with a search query.  Are we going to help them out or what??

When my son wrote “Nintendo Wii” on his letter to Santa he knew exactly what he wanted. If Santa delivers the wrong thing then he’s going to be disillusioned and disappointed in the whole process. You know what I’m getting at.

A new video podcasting toy…

Just got the Kodak Zi6 pocket video camcorder. It’s proper HD! Should be very useful for video blogging and the like… This is just a quick example of some output types…

.mov out of the cam converted to .avi, edited in Prem Pro and encoded back to .avi (1.6mb):

.mov in HD 30 frames per second (the Zi6 can also do 60fps) uploaded straight to Vimeo (13mb):

SEO Bombs!

Great new SEO tool from Google themselves? Or just too much time on my hands this Friday morning? I think you know…

Fatboy Bean Bags & Picure Frames

traphic marketing are very pleased to announce a new client. 4×90 are a large eCommerce company with a network of websites selling a variety of products direct to consumers.

traphic has the pleasure of working with the web developer, Blue Box Software, on this project and the objective comes in 2 parts.

Our first task is to improve the organic rank of the website 4×90.com for the search term ‘frames’. Now this is a very broad term and is certainly not going to be a quick fix. 4×90 sell a very wide variety of picture frames for photos framing, picture framing for paintings both in bulk to frame retailers, individually to consumers looking for frame related gifts and products and to professional picture framers looking for a reliable supplier of picture framing supplies on the web.

Our first task has been to ensure that on page optimisation, site structure and internal linking are all adequate for the purposes of this task and this will be allied to a comprehensive link building campaign. We are extremely confident that we can make a real difference to these guys and are already steaming ahead with our link building campaign.

4×90 also run another website selling Fatboy branded giant bean bags and they want to rank highly for the search term ‘bean bags’. Again, very competitive and the project will follow a similar pattern as the frames project in tems of on page work and link building. For those who don’t know, Fatboy bean bags are the luxury, high end bean bags that cost a little more than your average bean bag and thus cost a little bit more too. They are available in a variety of shapes and sizes and there’s even  fatboy bean bag for dogs!