How To Leverage Squidoo Effectively?

How much backlinking is necessary? If it's much the same as any other page, why do people say "Google loves Squidoo?"

Forget rss and flikr and stuff like that. Useless.
You need to choose a topic and run with it.
Make the title and intro good.
Then do separate text areas for each subtopic.
Put some unique spin in it. Make a text areas for
a few of your links. Photos in each, with names
that match your content.
Go to your dashboard, click on lenses.
Run your cursor over the lens title, and click on health.
Do anything and everything it says to improve the health.
The title, subdomain, and intro are paramount in squidoo.
Doing a lens right takes all day. But the rewards are great!
DOn't be afraid to make a lens on a popular topic, not just
on your niche.

Paul

When you submit the feeds, do you just submit them, or add relevant tags?

Also, in terms of my own tips.

1) Use your keyword phrase that you are hoping the lens will be found for in both the URL and as many of the module titles as you can.

2) Add a table of contents... this will repeat all those module titles which have your keyword phrase.

3) Join groups. When logged into Squidoo, go to: Squidoo : Browse Groups

and browse and find groups relevant to your lens. When you are logged in, you will see a link that says Add existing lens to this group.

Squidoo used to emphasize to add your lens to a group, but it's downplaying groups. I think they found too many people were creating groups filled 90% with their own lenses and for their own purposes and so they put a freeze on creating groups and really stopped emphasizing it. But I believe each group that you are in is another link to your lens and you will often have lens owners come and visit your lens.

Finally... don't give up on a lens with low traffic (I've got a couple right now). Instead if you have ANY traffic... from your Dashboard -- Click on the Stats for that Lens, now click on the Traffic tab. Scroll down and see on the right, there is a "Keyword" section and in tiny print, it says These tags, or keyword phrases, delivered your lens to searchers. See one you haven't used? Add it to your lens (+)

I think this is a REALLY underused function. This tells you what search terms brought people to your lens. If the search term listed applies to your lens than definitely click the + next to it to add it as a tag. Now, also consider these are areas to grow your lens in. If you have one sentence that includes this term, maybe you want to expand your coverage and write more. After all if someone found your lens for that search term and it was not really the focus of your lens, how many more people will find your lens for that search term if you have more content related to that search term.

I've had pretty good luck with Squidoo, mostly through affiliate sales, not so much from Squidoo directly. But some lenses of mine have been really slow to take off. In fact, I also currently have a 0 views in last week one. But I just submitted the feed as recommended above, we'll see!