IDWholesaler sells lanyards themselves, including custom lanyards that can be imprinted with a company logo. So it’s important to their business to rank on various keyword phrases that include the word “lanyard”. Instead of trying to promote their products directly, however, they turned to the community of artists and craftspeople who make beautiful jewelry-inspired lanyards. The popularity of this art is easily seen in online communities and on stores like Etsy.com where you can find beautiful, one-of-a-kind lanyards for ID badges or other purposes (like holding eyeglasses around your neck). IDWholesaler engaged these artists with a unique contest.

Lanyard Contest Sub-site

The engagement point for the contest was a special subsection of their website devoted to the lanyard contest. These pages informed contestants of the rules of the contest and its prizes, and allowed visitors to vote on their favorite submissions. It also encouraged visitors to follow the design contest on Facebook and Twitter, and to share a keyword-rich link using the AddThis widget. Every artist who submitted an entry was given a “badge” to include on their own website with optimized keyword text links back to IDWholesaler.com.

Lanyard Contest Facebook Page

Of course, many crafters love to blog and participate in online forums as well, so the contest spread like wildfire, with the participants blogging about their progress and sharing the contest with fellow artisans. In the end, IDWholesaler received 70 entries and over 3600 votes. But the whopper numbers are the SEO-related ones – they received an 8% increase in inbound links, and a 43% lift in non-paid traffic related to the term “lanyard”.

So for those of you looking for creative ways to spread the word about less-then-exciting products, think outside the box like IDWholesaler did in this contest.

Special thanks to Kate at IDWholesaler.com for bring sharing the results of this campaign with us!

An interesting semi-SEO tactic that has become popular over the past year in Squidoo. Squidoo is a site where people can publish a webpage about a topic they feel knowledgeable about. Pages are called “lenses”, and authors are called “lensmasters”. You can write a Squidoo lens on almost any topic of your choosing! So how about one related to the products you sell?

When you create a lens, you have a number of modules you can add to the lens to create your content. The basic text comes in the form of the Text/Write module. Use this module to enter a paragraph of text that will appear on your lens. Other modules include a link list, and RSS feed (which displays headlines, snippets, and/or full posts from a given RSS feed), Amazon (which links to related books), del.icio.us bookmarks, YouTube videos, a guestbook, and many more.

Unfortunately, the potential of Squidoo for SEO has attracted tons of SEO spammers, creating dozens of lenses that offer little or no value to the Squidoo community. It doesn’t make a lot of sense – a Squidoo lens has to be promoted just like any other web page. But the hype has attracted these types, so a controversy has arisen about the use of Squidoo for SEO and about Squidoo’s value in general. In fact, during the summer of 2007, Squidoo lenses stopped appearing in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages) almost completely, though the reasons are speculated to be unrelated to Squidoo’s spam. More recently, Squidoo lenses are again appearing near to top of Google search results for certain phrases. In fact, at the time of this writing, a lens is #1 for the Google search on “laptop bags“.

So how do you create a Squidoo lens the right way? Commit some of your time and effort to create a truly valuable page. Offer unique, hand-written content that is meant to inform, not just to promote your business. Once you’ve created a page, begin to promote it. Some ideas direct from Squidoo: Mention it in your blog, link to it from your facebook or myspace profiles, join a related Squidoo group, and even enter it into the Lens of the Day contest if you think it’s good enough.

And of course, don’t forget to link to your website from your Squidoo page!