Most people who have experienced any sort of traffic success on their Squidoo lenses have done so by using at least a little bit of keyword research. There’s simply too much going on in the Internet to stumble on the perfect keyword phrase very often.
I personally like to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to perform my keyword research. You simply type in your keyword phrase, and the tool returns the number of people who are searching for that term on a monthly basis, along with a bunch of similar search terms and their respective search volumes. If you sign in to your Google account, you can view up to 800 generated keyword phrases; otherwise, the limit is 100.
Each person has his or her own criteria for how many searches he or she wants to find for a given phrase. Some people are fine with 80 views per month; some prefer to find phrases with 8000. It all depends on what your specific goals for the lens in question are.
This part is easy enough for me. It’s finding the competition on a specific keyword phrase that can get a little tricky. After all, if there are already a ton of websites optimized for your keyword phrase, you’re not likely to make it through to the coveted top ten search engine results. Think about it like food stands at a fair. There are four stands in a row, two of which are serving things you like to eat (funnel cakes and fried candy bars, for example) and tow of which are serving things you don’t like to eat (wilted lettuce and mayonnaise, for example). One of the stands serving foods you don’t like has a super-long line waiting to be served, and the other only has a few people waiting to be served, but it doesn’t really matter, because you don’t want to eat at either of them anyway. So let’s look at the other stands.
The funnel cake stand has a long line of patrons waiting to be served. They are unruly and restless, and the cook is serving slowly. You might not ever get to the front of the line. On the other hand, the fried candy bar stand only has a few patrons, and they look like they aren’t all that interested in the food. You’ll be at the front of the line in no time. Obviously, you’re going to choose that stand.
The point of all this is you want to choose a desirable keyword phrase that not many people have optimized for if you want your site to move up the search engine rankings quickly. This can get tricky, because you need to be intuitive. You can’t just use a bunch of generated numbers.
My favorite trick is to simply search for my desired term in Google. You can learn a lot based on the results you see there. If there are a bunch of well-respected websites at the top of the list (IGN and Gamestop for a gaming topic, for example), and they use the exact words you’re searching for, then you probably won’t have a ton of luck. If there is already a user-generated site (like Squidoo or Hubpages) on the front page of the search results, that’s a good sign. If you can optimize as well as or better than that site, you should do well.
Here’s a real life example: a few days ago, I published the lens Best Kinect Fighting Games. As you can see from this search, it’s already at the top of the Google results. You’ll see that the other items on the list mostly don’t use the search phrase, and that they mostly aren’t highly popular sites.
Hope this helps you to drive traffic to your Squidoo lenses! And if you’re looking for more tips, check out Tips to Increase Your Traffic on Squidoo.
Emma Squidoos 