Google has a high regard for the quality of the Squidoo site – six of my Squidoo lenses have top 3 positions for their targeted keywords.
Squidoo lenses provided a significant advantage as PPC landing pages because they can attract a high “quality score”.
A high quality score for your landing page and site can affect your Google Adwords results in three ways:
1. decrease the cost-per-click (CPC) of your keywords
2. improve the position of your PPC ad on the content network
3. improve the placement of your ad in the search results.
Google takes into account a range of factors when determining landing page and site quality. These include relevance and originality, transparency, navigability and your site’s impact on the visitor’s computer.
There is ample evidence in organic search results that Google has a very high regard for the quality of Squidoo itself as an internet marketing platform (site). The Squidoo site does not interfere with the visitor’s experience and provides focused, relevant content about topics identified by keywords and tags.
As the name “lens” suggests, Squidoo sites (lenses) capture focused information about specific topics – so they display the desired aspects of relevance and originality (if you add some original content and presentation). Squidoo lenses provide easy navigation with a table of contents and internal linking strategies. The newly enhanced profile page adds considerable transparency for the site and the lensmaster.
Aligning tags and content with keywords for a specific PPC ad campaign can build on Google’s positive site assessment and improve the “quality score” of your Squidoo landing page.
Relevance and focus are key defining characteristics of good Squidoo lenses. So a focused, relevant Squidoo lens, used as a PPC landing page, can generate a high quality score.
Squidoo lenses also have another advantage in the quality stakes because Google automatically deep indexes your Squidoo lens. In other words, Google takes all of your content into account when determining “quality” and “ranking”.
Google indexes your lens URL, lens description, module headings, content within modules, tags, hyperlinks, images, Technorati tags and videos on your Squidoo lens. You can encourage further deep indexing by highlighting keywords (using bold or italics), varying your anchor text for hyperlinks, creating links between modules, using variations of your keywords in modules and adding RSS feeds.
As you improve your Squidoo lens landing page for your PPC campaign, your “quality score” will improve, your CPC will drop and you will gain a higher PPC ad position in both context and search results.