One of the most common pieces of advice these days seems to be “write good, unique content”. While this is true, there’s a word that I seem to use a lot in my forum posts: “relevance”.

Why? Search engines love to make associations between ‘things’ that are related - this is how they work. Ultimately, they associate your search query with a web page that is related to it. They do this by finding similarities between words on a web page, and in the links to a web page.

So, how can you make your lens have “relevance”?

Content - firstly, the text of the lens itself should be focused on a single topic. That is why Squidoo call them ‘lenses’ - because they ‘focus’. I see many lenses that attempt to cover many different topics, which will only confuse search engines and visitors alike. If you have a lens like this, then consider separating parts of it into new lenses.

Tags - the tags you choose for your lens must be relevant. It’s no use picking a popular tag just because it might get you exposure; search engines will disregard it, as will any visitors to that tag. Stick to tags that appear in your content, or are common variations.

Groups - the best groups to join are the ones that are about your topic (there are other criteria, as described in the Guide to Groups). This is because the Groups title appears on your lens, which adds weights to those keywords. Groups also collects together lenses on the same topic, which means links that the search engines like, and traffic from interested visitors. Avoid free-for-all or anything-goes type Groups; they add no value to your lens.

Lensroll - as with groups, aim for relevance. Many Lensmasters are tempted to Lensroll their own lenses onto each lens, which is not the right thing to do. By all means, Lensroll your own lenses, but only if they are relevant. If you do not have any of your own lenses that you can Lensroll, then find another high quality that fits. Or, build more lenses. (Snippet from Using The Lensroll Feature)

Links - search engines judge the ‘authority’ of a web page by how many other web pages (websites) link to it. However, not just any old links will do; they need to be from pages that are also about the same topic. You also want to the text of the link (aka anchor text) to match your lens; use variations of your title, and avoid text like ‘click here’. Links from your lens should also follow these same guidelines.

That about wraps it up for this post - I just need to say this one more time: Relevance is Key!