If you're completely new to squidoo, check out my Squidoo in 3 Easy Steps article.

A squidoo lens is a great SEO and traffic building tool, but it's probably more powerful than it looks at first glance. If you write an aritlce make a lens, link to your site, and then leave it, you are not using squidoo to it's full potential. You are missing out on a powerful and authoritative one-way link from a high-ranking website. Yeah, I know, sounds a bit propaganda-ish, but there is a lot of truth in what I just said. Let's take a look.

A squidoo lens should be considered a whole webpage of it's own. Believe it or not, squidoo lenses get high rankings in Google. If you play your cards right, you can ramp up the authority of your squidoo lens in Google, and then pass that authority on to your site with a link. So how do you build up the authority of your lens?

(1) Well, how do you build authority to any site? In fact, what's the point of having a squidoo lens in the first place? That's right, links. So, just like any site (which is how you should treat your squidoo lens) that you're trying to get to rank well in search engines and in general, you get links. It really doesn't matter how, but link-building is a great way to build authority to your lens. You might try submitting to a few site directories, or linking from a blogger you created for that purpose.

(2) Another great way to build authority, as always, is with social media. And, as always, it comes with a double bonus: links AND traffic. Bookmarking is probably one of the best ways to get authority to your site in Google's eyes. A few words that should help spark your memory… digg, del.icio.us, sphinn, reddit, stumbleupon, and all that other good stuff. Just bookmark your article (this is where having a good article comes in handy, because the better the content, the more likely it is that people will like it. The more likely that people will like it, the more likely they are to bookmark it, and then you get all the goodies… i.e. traffic and links).

So now you're working to get your squidoo lens to rank number one in Google, and you're trying to pass it as much authority as you can. Here are some more features of squidoo you can utilize if you want to drill down and really stretch squidoo to its full potential.

(3) One thing that you'll definitely want to do is join relevant groups. This will get you mixed in with the squidoo community of lens masters (that's what they call members of squidoo… 'lens masters'). To join a group, first go to your dashboard and click  the 'My Groups' tab at the top of the page. Joining groups can also raise your rankings within squidoo (always a good thing) and get your lens more views from inside of squidoo, which is also good, because squidoo users have the ability to rate lenses. If you can get people to rate your lens well, your authority will rise within the squidoo site.

(4) Another good thing to do is add more relevant tags to your lens. Squidoo has you create 3 initial tags, but you can add more later, up to 40 in fact. These can be multiple word phrases, or individual keywords. Take advantage of this. When you create tags, it gets some internal linking going around the squidoo server, and Google loves links, including internal linking. Essentially, that means this for you:

lots of tags = happy Google

A good equation if you ask me. If you already have a lens, just go to your dashboard, go to the 'My Lenses' tab, and click the 'Edit' button. Once the page has loaded, you should see a sidebar pop up on the right, with your text modules, introduction modules, and RSS modules on the left. In the sidebar on the right there should be a 'Tags' option. Click the orange edit button directly to the left, and then add some relevant tags.

So, that does it for this post. If you poke around on squidoo for a while, you're bound to turn up a lot of interesting info; it's actually quite a nice little site, besides its uses for the internet marketer and blogger. Feel free to ask any quesitons you might have about the post, or topics raised by the post, I'd be happy to try to answer as best I can.