Squidoo Your Way to the Top of Search Engine Rankings

One social networking site that is quickly gaining popularity is Squidoo. Squidoo is the brainchild of Seth Godin. The idea behind this site is to give people what they want.

According to Seth, many people searching for information via the search engines are becoming frustrated because of the ongoing need to continually click on search result links only to find themselves having to research still further.

What Squidoo offers is a central location where people searching for specific information can find everything they want compiled under one specific 'lens'. The lens is based on the perspective of the 'lensmaster'.

The beauty of it is that within that specific lens you will find a lot of relevant information, compiled and collected in one central location. This in turn saves searchers time and frustration. Often times these 'happy' searchers will rank your lens, thus increasing its popularity and your exposure.

And therein lies one of the 'secrets' to generating traffic via Squidoo-getting your lens highly ranked. To do this, you need only ask visitors to rate you! If you get creative, there are a number of ways to increase the likelihood of this.

For example, if you have a mailing list (and you should) that is related to your lens, why not mail your readers and ask them to visit you lens and rate it? You can also post similar requests on your blog, in articles, signature files, etc.

What many people don't realize about Squidoo is that its linking preferences fly in the face of conventional SEO teachings.

Search engines like Google will reward you for one-way inbound links while they discourage the overuse of outbound links. Squidoo, on the other hand, wants you to include outbound links and rewards you to do so by giving you a higher ranking!

They reward outbound links because, if you recall, they want to give searchers what they want; a single location (a lens) where they can find relevant information, compiled and collected in an easy to review format.

Squidoo came to life in late 2005 and currently has over 80,000 lens created by Squidoo-ers. Of those 80,000, there are many terrific lenses. Only a small number of them, however, are marketed effectively.

By taking action on the information in this article, you can become one of the few Squidoo-ers out there who generates a very targeted and constant flow of traffic that converts well.