How To Pick Your Primary Tags
Originally posted on SquidU Forum as The Importance of Primary Tags.
This post was published on April 21st, 2008 and updated on July 23rd, 2009.
The Primary Tag is the first tag you are asked to define when creating your new lens, and it is an often misunderstood and poorly utilised by many Lensmasters. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem do a whole lot, but there are some important points you should know.
Over half of the lenses on Squidoo have poorly chosen Primary Tags!
It is important for Lensmasters to choose good keywords for their Primary Tag, as it can have a significant effect on the ranking of the lens. Every appearance of the Primary Tag on your lens adds weight to that key phrase on your lens, as well as creating a relevant link from the tag page.
More importantly (and relatively recently), the tag page gives priority to lenses that use that tag as their Primary Tag, listing them before all of the other lenses. This means that for one well chosen tag, your lens will get the prime spot on the tag page.
There is also the lens directory here at SquidUtils, which automatically collates lenses by Primary Tag. Only those tags that have 3 or more good lenses under them will be featured, so there’s another reason to pick yours carefully.
Here are some tips to help you pick the right keywords:
1. Your Primary Tag wants to be the most important key phrase that you can think of. For example, if your lens is about a person or a product, stick to just their name.
2. Keep your tag to just 2 or 3 words, where possible. One word is not always specific enough (unless the subject is a strong brand like Pepsi), and more than 3 words can sometimes be too specific. Of course, it does depend on your subject matter.
3. Don’t simply repeat your Lens title again (even though this is the default when building a lens). Your title should include as many keywords as you can sensibly fit (no keyword stuffing!), while your Primary Tag is about your key phrase.
4. Format your Primary Tag nicely – keep it Capitalised, spelt correctly (!) and don’t include any special characters or quotes (“). Use spaces between words, and not dashes or underscores.
5. Pick a Primary Tag which is popular, i.e. people will be likely to be searching for it and other lenses are might also have the same Primary Tag (but not too popular).
If you have Firefox then the Lens Workshop Addon will highlight the tags in the workshop based on their popularity. Avoid any tags that are highlighted in red, as no other lenses use them.
6. Group related lenses under the same Primary Tag – this creates strong links between them, and helps them all to rank well for the target key phrase.
Here are some (random) examples of good Primary Tags:
» Harry Potter
» Xbox 360
» Dog Training
» Digital Photography
Bad examples:
» The Whole Lens Title Again
» Kee Frase Speled Wong
» lowercasewithnospaces
» “Phrase in Quotes”
Once you’ve got your Primary Tag picked out, you will then need to think of some good keywords for the other, ordinary tags. Start with the Primary Tag, and then think of variations from there. The regular tags can be shorter or longer, but you should keep them as relevant to the lens content as possible. Single word tags tend to have poor relevance, but good PageRank. Avoid tags that are runtogetherwords, unless they are commonly used, e.g. videogames.
Happy tagging…
Related posts:
- Making the Most of Squidoo Tags
- Relevance is Key!
- 4 Out Of 5 Lenses Have Poor Health!
- Improved Tag Pages at Squidoo
EXCELLENT post!
Going back to my blog right now to make sure a link to this is within the post content.
Thank you for sharing this =)
Jennifer
Great information. I’m going to make a few changes to my Squidoo lenses today based on what I learned here.
Great stuff fluff!
I’m working back through my lenses now. Its amazing how many early ones were just thrown together without key word consideration. This list will help keep me on track as I try to balance Pagerank, lensrank, and other factors.
Thank you, I gotta go and change some tags right away.
It never occurred to me that the main word should be capitalized or included on the list for meta tags. Very good article.
Thank you.. Shelina
Thank you so much very helpful. Newbie here and trying to learn as quickly as possible.
Fan-freakin’-tastic! Just the kind of “under the hood” stuph I was lookin’ for. If you’re using Squidoo for marketing purposes, you’ve gotta get the tags right and I was having trouble finding good info on this subject. I’m printing this out and keeping it for reference. Thanks so much and keep up the great work!
HI again!
So now that I’m follwoing your very helpful directions, I’ve run into a couple of questions. Searching for the answers elsewhere was in vain, but please forgive if these are is stupid questions — my defense is that I’m new. Here goes…
1) You say to initial cap (capitalized first letters) your Primary Tag. OK, cool. But what about the other tags?
2) You say to pick a Primary Tag which is popular. Uh, er… how do I determine that? I know how to find that data in insofar as regular keywords go on the Internet in general, but I assume you mean Squidoo popularity? Or no? Please clarify.
3) How many tags are optimal? 5? 8? 10? Is there a “sweet spot?” Does anybody really know? (I ask it this way because while I’m new to Squidoo, I know there is considerable debate in SEO circles over what Google really likes… I imagine there may be the same debate about Squidoo itself, too).
4) I notice that Squidoo itself throws more tags at me, some of which are just run-together versions of tags I’m already using. Do I include those too? Where do you draw the line?
Thanks much for any and all help! (:-)]
Thank you very, very much for this!
Hi Karl – here are some quick answers to your questions:
1) the other tags will always appear in lowercase, so it doesn’t matter.
2) a popular tag is one that lists a lot of lenses on it. More than 10 is good, but don’t pick one that is too popular (i.e. 100s).
3) there’s a maximum of 40, and I would say you should have at least 20. Aim for an even mix of short popular keywords as well as some “long tail” keyphrases. Most importantly, keep the relevant!
4) runtogetherwords are the most useless tags you can have, except maybe a few of the popular ones like ‘videogames’.
I hope that helps…
thefluffanutta
As per your excellent directions, I have changed the tags on my one and only lens. My future lenses will be tagged with this instruction set in mind.
thanks for the information, I’ll be making the necessary changes thanks to your tips
regards
Thank you so much. I have learned so much. Always glad for help it makes my lens better.
I just went through my 23 Celtic Music lenses and changed the primary tag to Celtic Music. I found some lenses that could benefit from additional tags as well. And I added “celtic music” without quotes.
Thanks very much for this information!
I should review my own lens now.
Thank you. I have continued to be confused about tags since I started with Squidoo. I will re-read this a few more times and start changing them. !
I think everyone here is in agreement – excellent info. Even though I have SEO experience, I was still scratching my head about some issues with Tags. All clear now – Thanks.
This ‘tags’ thing had me very confused. Thanks for enlightening me. Now I can make changes and have my tags all lined up, just like a pro!
Just polishing my lens ready for the challenge! So thanks very much for sharing and helping to spruce it up to its best!
Thanks for your excellent information. Now I understand the importance of proper tagging.
This is such important information. I wish I had known about this when I first started my lens. I need to make some changes now.
Thank you for sharing this information.
Hi thanks for info, very new to this. I’m concentrating on stuff to do with Tamil Tigers as I’m fed up with the senseless killing out there and bureaucracy in UK and the violence and fraud worldwide as a result. I’ve been quite close to this story at top levels for some time.
Hoping I can start some action protest day eventually but I think it may be tricky to drive traffic to site. I’m at a loss which other sites to link to as I can’t find any relevant to such a heavy topic. Is it possible to link to other sites outside Squidoo easily.
I do agree its very addictive. I wish there was a way to upload speech files.
Anyway thanks guys, good to know you are out there.
Hi
This site just gets better and better
Congratulations FluffaNutta
I’ve been struggling with the keywords for the last few days and this article explains a lot. I’ve never heard before that the tags should be capitalized and a few other things so thank you so much for sharing the “tagging science”!
Fantastic information! I am doing just about everything wrong. Amazing that some of my lenses rank number 1 on Google. Going to sort every one of them out today! Thanks a lot
Christianna
How To Pick Your Primary Tags is important. Thanks FluffaNutta for this Primary Tags explaination post. I have visited this Lensmasters Tips post a few times since I read it in April to help guide me.
This information is valuable. Many thanks for it!
This was so helpful. I was having the hardest time trying to figure out the primary tag.
It is really worth reading. I am sure I have to change my primary tag for few of my lenses.
This is excellent, I am 100% with you.
Thanks
Michey
Thanks for explaining about primary tags. Could you also add a specific example of a good lens name and excellent primary tag duo? In the above examples of Primary Tags, like Harry Potter, I’m not sure how this would relate to the Lens name. I’m new to lensmaking and still trying to understand the basics.
Some useful advice. Its important to focus on a few tags (<5) and build the page ainly focussing on them. Additional tags should then be related to these in the page content.
Really interesting! I didn’t know that our tags didn’t affect the searches on Google and other search engine but would definitely affect the searches on Squidoo!
Thanks.
Dom.