Regardless of whether you are optimizing a Squidoo lens or any other webpage, your goal is for people to find your page when they do Google and Yahoo searches. After all, you want them to have the opportunity to click on your link. Thus, it is important to you that your page appear in the first few pages (and ideally on the first page) of searches.

To get a high position in the SERPs (search engine result pages), your page/site is judged (by the search engine) on the number and quality of inbound links and the relevancy of its content to the keyword being used. You have a great degree of control over the content of your lens, probably moreso than your control over who links to it. Your content, and specifically your support of certain keywords, is clearly of great importance.

Your Goal

To ensure that people find your lens in the searches, you need to optimize it based on certain keywords/keyphrases. It's a process that requires you to think about the people you wish would visit your lens. What are they like? And more specifically, what keywords will they type into the Google search box?

To optimize your lens for a specific keyword/keyphrase, you need to mention that keyword in several prime places in your lens. If possible, include the keyword in your folder name (that's the part that comes after "www.squidoo.com/"). Next, try to get it into the lens title and/or heading in your Introduction module. Additionally, it is important that your keyword appear sprinkled lightly throughout the text of your lens. And it goes even further than that. Add some paraphrased text and modifications of the actual selected keyword. The search engines have become very sophisticated and want to see good quality, not just a mass of text stuffed with keywords. They can tell the difference.

If you selected "hydrogen cars" as your keyword, you might choose as the lens title: "Hydrogen Cars Save The Environment." Then, perhaps make the headline for the Introduction: "The Future is Now for Hydrogen Powered Cars." Throughout the text, mention "hydrogen cars" a few more times, but also include "hydrogen powered cars," "hydrogen powered automobiles," and probably even "alternative fuel for cars." Use a lot of different ways to make your use of the keyword and the "idea" of the keyword sound conversational.

Keyword Selection

Before you begin creating your lens, you should already have decided on two or three keywords that you wish to target. Selecting them wisely is of major importance.

Let's say that you chose "lawn mowers" as your keyword. Now if you think about it, that is likely to be a frequently used search term and there are probably a lot of pages on the internet that will show up. At the time of this writing, Google returns 483,000 pages when "lawn mowers" is the search term. That is a lot of competition that you must surpass if you want to be on the first page.

If we change the search term to "electric lawn mowers" the number of returned pages drops dramatically. Only 14,000 pages were found. That's considerably less competition. If we further qualify our search to "used electric lawn mowers", only 9 pages are found. So, the obvious conclusion is that if your lens can get listed in Google for "used electric lawn mowers" you will definitely appear on the first page.

The problem with "used electric lawn mowers" is that there is the possibility that not many people search for it. Having your page in the first page of the SERPs is a good thing, but if no one searches for the keyword, it does you no good.

Keyword Popularity

This brings us to the concept of keyword popularity. A keyword/keyphrase can be popular with searchers. That is, it is frequently used by people doing searches with Google or Yahoo. I would guess, for example, that thousands of people type "lawn mowers" into Google everyday.

Keyword popularity must also be considered in terms of the sites that are found when the keyword is used. We've already seen the hundreds of thousands of pages that are returned for "lawn mowers".

For your lens to get traffic, you want to select a keyword that is popular with searchers, but relatively unpopular with other websites. The fewer sites that pop up in a search, the fewer you have to surpass to make it to the first page of results.

Summary

When you are ready to create your lens, consider both the people searching and the number sites in competition. If traffic is a primary concern, you must choose a topic that gives you the flexibility to strike a balance between the two types of popularity.