Squidoo is a very useful channel to drive traffic to your website. On Squidoo, you can create lens with content of any topic that you wish to share with others. Within your lens, you can insert URL links, either pointing them to your own websites or directly to the affiliate product merchant’s sales page. Because of Squidoo’s popularity on search engines, you can use it to drive organic search engine traffic to your website by having unique content and link popularity.

Sometimes, people might think that by having unique content in your Squidoo lens, it can get rank easily for multiple long-tail keywords, driving traffic to their websites. Yes, I am not saying this is not true, but for it to happen, it may take you some time. To rank faster for multiple long-tail keywords, what you need to do is to increase the link popularity of your Squidoo lens by getting more back links to it.  Before I touch on the various ways to increase link popularity of your lens, let me explain a little further on why you need to ultimately get your Squidoo lens rank well for multiple long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are search phrases that people type in search engines that you can’t possibly predict. For example, if your website is selling acne products, one of your main key phrase could be “acne treatment”. However, if your Squidoo lens is optimized for long-tail keyword, your lens will appear high on search engines when people are searching key phrases like “How to get rid of acne fast”, “acne free in 3 days”, “why do I get acne and how can i get rid of it”, etc. As you can see, these phrases are extremely long-tail and the searchers may be really desperate for acne cure which will most probably result in affiliate sales for you. Hope that from this short illustration, you can see the importance of ranking multiple long tail keywords on search engines.

To get your lens optimized for long-tail keywords, there are basically 2 very important factors that you need to take note of: 1) Unique content with the right keyword theme 2) Link popularity.

What I mean by unique content with the right keyword theme is to base your content around a theme that you wish to target. Let’s take the acne industry as an example. In the acne industry, after I did a quick research, I can identify 2 keyword theme. The first is to get rid of acne or acne treatment, and the other theme is about getting rid of old acne scars. Although both of these themes are about acne, but you can see that the need of the people searching for these 2 solutions are completely different.

To get your lens rank faster for multiple long tail keywords, you may want to consider boosting its link popularity. The gerenal rule of thumb for increasing link popularity is to get back links. For your Squidoo lens, there are a few ways that you can do it. Personally, I prefer using EzineArticles.com to link back to Squidoo. This means that I will write articles and submit to EzineArticles.com and point my articles to my Squidoo lens. These will help boost the Lens Rank of my lens and thus bringing more traffic to my website. I also make use of various social networking and book marketing platforms to boost my lens popularity. You can book mark your lens at Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc or include links back to your lens on your various social networking profile like Facebook and MySpace. You can also ping your site by using pinging services from Pingomatic and Pingoat.

Once you see that you have succesfully built a long-tail squidoo lens, you can duplicate your marketing process and create more Squidoo lens for the niche that you are in. This will greatly increase your chance of generating more affiliate revenue in that market.

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Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the foundation of Internet Marketing. In affiliate marketing, SEO is very important. SEO can be applied when you are writing your articles or designing your squeeze page. When done correctly, SEO is definitely the key to drive consistent targeted traffic to your sites, articles, or squidoo lens.

However, no one is perfect when it comes to the ever-changing technology of search engine marketing and SEO. Sometimes, even SEO gurus will make very basic SEO mistakes due to either miscommunication or just plain carelessness. So if you want your site to rank well organically, you need to prevent yourself from making the same mistakes as them.

Let me share with you 4 common SEO mistakes that people make during search engine optimization:

1. Using the same Title and Meta description for all pages. Every page has its unique content and it should go the same for the Title and Meta tags. Each page should be optimized according to a particular set of keywords that are the most relevant to the content of that page. If you place the same title and meta description for all pages, your keywords will not match the content and thus making it harder to optimize.

2. Stop optimizing once results are shown. Many optimizers stop doing the necessary optimization such as off-page optimization when they see that their keywords have obtained high rankings. SEO is an ongoing process. Every day, there are competitors competing top ranking positions with you. With complacency, sooner or later your website will be knocked off from the top positions by them. What I do us to write articles consistently and submit to various article directories to gain more back links.

3. Placing a splash page as the home page. The home page is one of the most important pages of a website, whether be it for SEO purpose or visitors experience. By placing a splash page as the home page, it will result in a SEO disaster. So try to avoid having a splash page for your website. Instead, use a flash banner to make your site more interactive.
   

4. Forgetting that content is the king. In SEO, one of the most important aspects is the content. Search engines love fresh and unique content. Sometimes, optimizers are too focused on tagging and forget that content is very important. When you write your content, do not just write for the search engine sake. You need to consider your visitors’ experience too. Content stuffed with keywords but without real meaning and value will not result in any conversion. This will defeat the purpose of SEO for your site.

So when you optimize your site the next time, be sure not to make these mistakes like the others. Search engine optimization is an online marketing foundation for all websites, so make sure that you do a good job on it.

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If you are thinking of outsourcing your SEO work for your various websites to a SEO agency or consultant, I hope this post will be helpful to you…

A professional SEO consultant is essential for the success of a search engine optimization project. With the right input and expertise from a SEO consultant, SEO can be carried out more effectively and efficiently, thus helping your site to achieve higher ranking much faster.

A quality SEO consultant needs to have proven track record and portfolio. Do not afraid to ask for references and find out his working relationships and SEO results with his clients. A proficient SEO consultant will also know how to make use of the right keywords to attract the right target audience to visit your website from the search engines. It is always about results and you need to make sure that the consultant has the necessary skillsets and knowledge to deliver it.

Now, let me share with you 5 qualities that I think a professional SEO consultant should have:

1. Knowledgeable in online marketing. The consultant should have a vast knowledge on website promotion on the Internet. He or she must know how to promote a website on various search engines by using the right keywords. Sometimes, the most generic keyword is not always the best keyword to optimize. The consultant should conduct a research and find out what are the keywords that your prospects actually type in search engines to look for your products or services.

2. Onsite optimization knowledge. He or she must be proficient enough to tag the different pages of your website with the right keywords. Onsite optimization is more than just putting keywords in the Title and Meta tags. The keywords used in each page must match the content of that page. At the same time, the frequency that the keywords appear in the particular page also needs to be taken into consideration. Too many occurrence of a keyword in a single page is considered keyword stuffing and search engines will penalize your site for this.

3. Offsite optimization knowledge. He or she needs to be familiar with offsite optimization techniques such as directory submissions, link buildings, articles submission, social bookmarking, etc.

4. Know how to retain your website visitors. Driving huge traffic to your website is not enough if none of them take the particular action that you want them to take (such as downloading a report, opting into a mailing list, or an online sale). Therefore, a professional SEO consultant should have the knowledge on landing page optimization so that he or she will know how to structure your page to increase your conversion.

5. Up-to-date with the latest SEO news and techniques. He or she needs to be competent in the latest SEO techniques and methods by keeping himself updated with the latest SEO news.

With these, you are now equipped with the expectation of what a SEO consultant should have before you hire any consultant to optimize your site.

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