Here is one powerful way you can incorporate Squidoo and similar types of web sites into your search engine optimization and promotion campaign. This concept, which I'm referring to as "bouncing," is sound for any of the major search engines because they all take links into account when ranking web sites.



In a nutshell, this is the process of linking to a high PageRank web site that also links back to your web site. The purpose is to help Google or another search engine spider find the site, so that it can then find the link back to your site. It probably seems much like link swapping, but we are mainly concerned with certain types of web sites where we control the process of placing a link back to our web site.

This strategy works with social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg, as well as sites like Squidoo that allow you to post HTML content. Social bookmarking has incredible power if you systematically bookmark high quality content on your web site. If your content is good enough, you can grow your links exponentially.

The remainder of this article will deal with Squidoo. It lets you create pages (called "lenses" in Squidoo terminology) with links to anything you want, and you have complete control of the content on those pages. Google indexes and ranks Squidoo pages with much enthusiasm, and the site's home page has a very high PageRank. Certain other pages in Squidoo, such as lists of tags, also tend to have high PageRank.

Remember, PageRank is spread from site to site via links (unless the links are "nofollow" links). Squidoo tags pages, which are pages that list keywords people have used to categorize their Squidoo lenses, can have high PageRank values. The tags pages link to a list of pages that use those tags, with those pages in turn linking to the Squidoo lenses that use those tags. So PageRank can be passed from the tags page, to a list of sites, to your Squidoo lens. You can then place a link on your Squidoo lens to your web site. Your Squidoo lenses will also have a list of tags which link to the tags pages.

So the "bouncing" referred to above refers to the process of placing a link from your web site or blog to your Squidoo lens (or another Squidoo page), so that search engine spiders can make their way from your web site to Squidoo and back to your web site, at which point you hopefully pick up some PageRank passed back from Squidoo.

If your main site is not indexed in Google or in another particular search engine, then this strategy does not work. The search engine needs to find your site to begin with, unless it finds your Squidoo lens first and finds your site that way, which would be great but not really a "bounce." Your Google rankings will improve as you bounce search engine spiders to other web sites, only to have them bounce right back, passing PageRank along with them.