I have analysed almost 70 thousand lenses at Squidoo by 2,250 Lensmasters, and I’ve identified a number of issues that common to a staggering 80% of these lenses. Some of these issues are preventing the lenses from ranking well in the Search Engines, and many Lensmasters have posted to the forums complaining about a lack of traffic.

Here is an overview of the issues I have found, and how Lensmasters can fix them.

Continue reading “4 Out Of 5 Lenses Have Poor Health!”

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”? Continue reading “Relevance is Key!”

Originally posted on SquidU Forum as The Importance of Primary Tags.

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!

By default, the Primary Tag will be the same as the Lens Title, which is not optimal. It is important that Lensmasters 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.

With the new layout for Maxed lenses, Squidoo introduced the Discovery Tool underneath the Introduction. This adds links to other related lenses, and it’ll use the Primary Tags if it can. This means the Primary Tag is more important than ever. If you have a bunch of lenses that are about the same subject, then picking the same Primary Tag for all of them will ensure maximum exposure in the Discovery Tool. If you do not have multiple lenses on the same topic, then at least try to pick a Primary Tag that has a good number of other lenses too, so that those lenses link to yours.

Here are some tips to help you pick the right keywords:
Continue reading “How To Pick Your Primary Tags”