Squidoo Lens Name Advice Please...

It would ultimately depend on which keywords you are targeting. Example: "squidoo.com/acnenomoreacnetips" would be better off being "squidoo.com/nomoreacnetips" or "squidoo.com/acnenomoretips" to prevent redundancy issues.

Once you get into keyword research, you'll see that "acne no more" has twice more SEO competition than "no more acne" - quite an intriguing find. This does not generally mean that its more lucrative because we are just talking about SEO competition. If you would want to rank high then its better to pick a keyword w/ less competition. In that case squidoo.com/nomoreacne.

Hope this helps.

My question here is really since so many of the good keyword phrases and terms are taken...is it better to get a name with the exact phrase and include the company name such
as
squidoo.com/lowesbuildadeck
or
just the exact keyword phrase
squidoo.com/buildadeck

and if the keyword phrase is not available is it better to go with company name and phrase

squidoo.com/lowesbuildadeck

or a variation on the desired phrase with no company name?

squidoo.com/buildadecktoday

Thanks!

Great lens topic first off! Squidoo is very popular and Google likes it just as much.

Your Squidoo lens are going to be found by Title, url and the tags. When first starting out you want to focus on the title and url and make it match your targeted key words.

For your example above with Lowes and 'build a deck' it would all depend on the EXACT key word phrase you want. Maybe some people type in "how to build a deck" or "build a deck." Once you determine this it will be much easier.

And yes there are a lot of people writing lens on Squidoo so your options may be limited, but make the Title and url as close to the key word phrase as you can.

I've noticed when I've put the entire key word phrase in my TITLE it get's picked up very quicked and I have been able to be listed on the first page of Google within a day.

So you all are saying NOT to include the company name in the URL title...but just the keywords
and if I cant get those keywords with or without hypens (likely) to choose something as close as possible.

It sure would be much easier if I included the company name to get the keyword match, though it would be + company name.

Google can parse the words out of a compound word phrase in an url. However, I have used URLs in Squidoo with up to four dashes that have shown at #1 in Google for the search term.

Even though you see a lot of people use an underscore to separate URL words, e.g. build_decks, you should never do that. Google looks at build_decks as one word. Do a search for "build_decks" (8 results) and "build-decks" (20,000,000 results) and you will see that different results are returned.

Make each text module begin and end with your keyword phrase in bold, even if it doesn't fit contextually. For example...

Build Decks
Ever wonder how to...

I say this all the time like a broken record--but Google will only return two Squidoo lenses for any keyword phrase searched. Take your keyword phrase and do a search. See if you can find two lenses showing for that term. If there were, for example, two Squidoo lenses showing for that search on the first page... it may be tough to beat them (or one of them).

In cases like that you might want to do the same search and see where any Blogger blogs show up. If they are buried deep--then I would consider setting up a blog there rather than using Squidoo.

If you don't find a Squidoo lens until page 4-5, chances are good you can sneak yours in above them if you have the back-links. Use YaHoo Site Explorer to see where competing Squidoo lenses are getting their back-links and get some there too.

You must be willing to do what your competition is unwilling or unable to do in order to outrank them. It isn't always hard.

If folks have high-ranking Squidoo and Blogger blogs showing on the front page already, you could set up a WordPress blog and host it on your own domain. That would get around the (only show two listings from a domain on a search that Google uses). Google likes a variety of domains to show on searches.

I'm old-school (probably because I'm old) and people don't consider keyword density important as much anymore; I do. At Squidoo, keep it at 2.8-3.4% and Google will give you some love.

And, (and this is big) work some LSI related words into your lens. This is especially important to do adjacent to the outgoing links you use. For example, if you were sending traffic from your lens to a "deck building" company, pack some words related to deck building around the links going out to the product, vendor, or manufacturer's page.

A simple, but not necessarily the best way to do this is to do a Google search for "deck building" and find 1. all of the words Google bolds in the snippets returned, 2. by looking at the bold words in the "related searches" shown at the bottom of the page (free standing, cost, framing, composite, railings, etc.), and 3. look at the bolded words in search suggestions that appear under your search box as you type the words in (materials, footings, framing, building codes, cost, etc).

I searched for "build a deck" and there are a fair number of authority sites showing and some have huge numbers of backlinks (the hgtv site at #10 has over 100,000 so sites like that cannot be beaten easily). Still, I don't find any Blogger or Squidoo sites showing, so you should give it a try.

There are about 60 lenses in Squidoo shown in a Squidoo search for "building a deck" but only about half of them are actually about that topic. The #1 rated Squidoo lens has about 100 back-links but most of them are coming from other Squidoo lenses by the same person. The lens ranks well in Squidoo because of 1. all of the modules used, and 2. the large number of star ratings--but the lens is not optimized well at all for Google--indeed, it does not show anywhere in the first 20 pages of Google listings.

Go get 'em kid!