Can Squidoo help bring more traffic to your web sites? Or is this something that's just too good to be true?

Squidoo.com is another place online where you can publish your own Squidoo Lens or site for free. Unlike the usual free blog sites, a lens is usually just a single page.

That single page will contain links to other pages (such as your own web site), which readers may be interested in.

Internet marketers have been talking about the "power of Squidoo" and how putting up your own lens will drive web traffic to your existing site or sites.

Anyway, here are some observations:

1. If you update your Squidoo lens often enough, it will be featured in the Squidoo community, and that exposure will help gain more visits from regular readers of Squidoo.

2. The highest page rank I've seen among Squidoo lenses is PR 5. The links mentioned in such pages (i.e., a link to the lens authors real website) had PR 0 scores. But it's probably just a matter of time before those scores go up. Probably.

3. Searching for Squidoo lenses in Google shows pages with PR scores of 3 or 4, and a lot of PR 0's.

4. If you're willing to put in the effort of updating a single page in Squidoo until it reaches PR5, then it will help a lot of you also channel some of that effort into writing articles and adding pages (yes, plural form) to your own web site.

5. It pays to have a Squidoo lens or page if you have an existing multi-page site or blog that contains useful content, or which motivates people to sign up for your newsletter. Otherwise, whatever traffic you gain with the help of your Squidoo lens will be wasted.

6. Some Squidoo pages that are highly visible in search engines have a very low PageRank. A few are PR4 sites.

7. Perhaps PageRank is overrated?

Yes, Squidoo can bring you more traffic. Exactly how much will depend on your lens. When I checked the stats of a site for the month where it got 66000 visitors, ten of those people came from a Squidoo lens page.

Those lenses were hardly updated, had a low rank, and yet brought in 10 visitors. How many more would have been attracted if those lenses were regularly updated? Well, that will be the subject of a future experiment.

If you find that 10 is such a low number, please consider that those people may bookmark your site and return to it directly, instead of clicking on a link found in a Squidoo lens. It is equally possible that those folks may tell others about your site.

Remember, though, that traffic with a purpose can be much more rewarding. So if you plan to funnel Squidoo traffic, please make sure the destination is worth going to.

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"Squidoo Traffic Secrets"
First Posted: December 18, 2006 | Filed in: Marketing Web Traffic

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