Designing Your Squidoo Lens
3

Let's move forward to today's question:

3. WHERE TO USE THOSE KEYWORDS IN YOUR SQUIDOO LENSES?

Having a great list of keywords is one thing. Using them well is quite another. Where should you place your key words and phrases for best results in your lenses?

For maximum effectiveness, you will need to place your keywords in the following places but you also need to ensure sure that the text reads well to your human visitors. If you do things right for the search engines but not the people who visit your site, they will find disjointed and poorly written material and they won't stay. Result: all your effort will be wasted.

We want to avoid that unpleasant result, so make sure that what you writes reads well. Make it flow smoothly with no awkward bits.

Where to insert your keywords:

In the lens title.

This is just as important with Squidoo as it is with regular webpages. Be sure to include your most important keyphrase in the title.

In the article text.

For the sake of having enough content (I want a minimum of 3 or 4 modules, as Squidoo calls them), each lens of mine has several articles. Also I try to remember to use my main keywords in the first paragraph of each article.

The other keyphrases? Slip them in several times on the page, so it all reads naturally.

In the tags list.

SEO (search engine optimization) people call them keywords, but Squidoo calls 'tags' and you can have 40 of them but my view is that 40 means you are going to have a lot of less-relevant tags. What I have now done is to get rid of the less targeted tags. Yes, even the ones that Squidoo suggests.

If you're adept with tracking (I'm not), you could try using all the available tags and then track the results to see if this is a good idea. Personally I cant be bothered -- it looks like too much work.

I've seen recommendations that we use 3-4 word tags and this makes sense to me as it brings you visitors who are more targeted and using these 'long tail' keywords also means you are competing against a smaller number of sites.

Squidoo allows you to run the words of your tags together, for example:
positive psychology
positivepsychology
think positively
thinkpositively
positive thoughts
positivethoughts

So in my lists of tags, I use both forms -- the separated words and the runtogetherwords. Search engines can apparently separate them.

By the way, since you are interested in how to succeed with Squidoo, I have a FREE email series you might like. You'll get my tips on how to improve your lensrank, how to generate traffic with Squidoo and how to make money with Squidoo.

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