squidoo logo, thanks to teamstickergiant for the image

I got pointed to something interesting today while reading about search enginge optomisation (seo), thanks to Tim Buchalka and takeoverpageone for their awesome advice about seo.

That interesting thing was Squidoo. It’s a really simple and easy way to collect everything about yourself in a simple to setup web page - and best of all it ranks really well in Google because of the ‘link juice’.

So I clicked the setup link and set up a page about myself. It took about five minutes in all (had to log in about three times which was annoying). I had to type in a brief description for my page, then write about msyelf a little bit - writing about yourself is always really difficult. You don’t want to sound like an idiot, but at the same time you don’t want to NOT saying anything about yourself. Squidoo has a little piece of text underneath the box you are writing in and it tells you if what you’ve written is good, and gives you ‘cmon’s to do more. That’s great, it’s like having a writing coach.

I added my basic modules and published my page. I was able to important the RSS feed of my latest blog entries, so this entry will be appearing shortly on my squidoo page. This is good as it gives me some link juice everytime I post an entry.

I’ve also added a text module and listed all my social media presences into it, from twitter to delicious. The plan is that when someone puts ‘edwalker’ into google, then hopefully find my presences really high up. It’s not easy as I have a very generic sounding name, but I’m determined to become a leading blogger and get myself right up there.

I’ll give it a month, and see if squidoo can make a difference.

I’ve also created a Squidoo for the organisation that I work for.

Do you Squidoo? What do you think of it? Any advice?

Such is the power of the web that when my girlfriend and I fancied an ice cream, it led to a search on Google for ‘proper dairy ice cream + Lancashire’. This yielded a few results, most notably the one from visitlancashire that caught my eye. Checked out the website for the company and called them to check they were in fact open and then roared off into the Wyre for a tasty ice cream.

Why is this important?

Because normally I would have just strolled down to the Spar and bought a magnum. Business’ need to be aware of the impact the web can have on even the most remote of searches and ensure their websites are easy to find, and high up the rankings - even for a modest ice cream parlour in Lancashire. And more and more, people will not be leafing through guidebooks - they’ll put what they want into the Google box and go with the answer.

Oh, and if you’re ever in Lancashire - Bond’s is well worth checking out, it includes an old school sweet shop. 100grams of sherbert lemons - heaven in a bag!