Using Squidoo to promote your business is an extremely effective way to get more traffic and improve your search engine rankings. Squidoo has a lot of trust with Google, with a home PageRank of 7 and many lenses (pages) with PageRanks of 4 or higher.

Here are a few smart ways of promoting your business on Squidoo.

==> Make a Lens about Your Main Keywords

Start by doing a search on Squidoo for other lenses on your topic. Look through the various things they cover in their lenses.

Then create your own lens, ideally targeting exact keyword phrases that you want your lens to rank for.

Try to make your lens better than any other lens that’s currently on your topic. Squidoo has a very savvy user base that loves great content but seriously frowns on poor content.

Don’t treat Squidoo as just a source of backlinks. It’s a serious source of high quality visitors. Tap into its community in addition to its search engine ranking abilities.

Make it a habit of creating lenses on Squidoo on topics related to your industry. One lens on its own might not bring you all the traffic and link juice that you want; but a steady stream of high quality lenses will do the trick.

==> Do a Lens on Specific Products

Product specific lenses are another great way to market on Squidoo.

Let’s say you own a business that sells car parts. One powerful marketing strategy you could use is to create a lens for each car part you’re selling.

So you’ll have lenses for car headlights, car bumpers, car engines, car spark plugs, etc. You can even go into sub-topics for each part: how to install spark plugs, choosing the right spark plugs, so on and so forth.

Specific products are great topics to create lenses around because the type of person looking for those products is probably in a buying mood.

==> Consider Buying Links from Lensmasters

What if you just wanted to get quality backlinks from Squidoo lenses without having to go through all the work of creating a high ranking Squidoo lens yourself?

One often-used strategy is to just buy links from lensmasters who’ve done the hard work for you.

Start by using Google and Squidoo’s search engines to find the highest ranking and highest PageRank lenses in your topic.

Contact the lensmasters who created those lenses directly and offer to pay for a link on their lens back to your website.

Expect to get a handful of no’s and a handful of yes’s. This is a very quick way of building high quality backlinks if you’re willing to spend the money.

These are a few smart ways to use Squidoo to bring more traffic and higher rankings to your online business. Squidoo has a lot to offer, including a lot of direct traffic and the ability to generate links that Google views favorably.