After my previous post about how tag pages aren’t indexed, I felt it was time to step back and take a fresh look at tags and what they are good for.

When you create a new lens, the creation wizard asks you for one Primary Tag, and three other tags. When you edit your lens, you can add more tags to the list - up to 40. Knowing what tags do will help you figure out the right ones for your lens.

The main purpose of tags is to tell Squidoo what your lens is about for when someone does a search within the site. If a lens has the tags ‘blue’ and ‘fuzz’, it will appear when someone searches for ‘blue fuzz’. Squidoo’s search facility can also find partial tag matches too, e.g. lenses with the tag ‘where to buy blue fuzz’ will also appear.

Update: Tags help Squidoo choose the right lenses whenever someone uses the internal search facility, but tags aren’t the only it factor uses. Squidoo’s search tool also uses the text from within the lens itself too, so if yours contains a particular phrase then it’ll appear in a search for that phrase.

The Discovery Tool directly connects lenses that share the same tags, which is much better than indirect linking via tag pages. These appear in the blue box immediately after the lens Introduction, with the title ‘Explore related pages’. This can result in a dozen or so links to your lens from other lenses.

Not everyone wants to see links to other lenses just under their introduction, and choose to disable it. This is fine to do as there are many other ways to manually make these connections. Now that the tag pages are hidden from search engines, making these connections is vitally important.

The Primary Tag has more weight than the regular tags for searches and the Discovery Tool, so make sure you use your main keyphrase (not your title!). For more details, see the previous blog post How To Pick Your Primary Tags.

Continue reading “Making the Most of Squidoo Tags”