T-A-G-S Spells Lens Indexing
I know i seem to cover this idea ad nauseum but I wanted to emphasize (again) the importance of tagging your lenses properly.
Why do we tag lenses?
Tag pages are one of the backbones of Squidoo’s site infrastructure. Not only do many features within Squidoo use the relationships from tag pages (Discovery Tool) but tag pages are also one of the primary tools for getting your lens indexed.
What is Indexing and why is it important?
When Google or Bing or any other search engine sends it’s ’spiders’ out to crawl the web, they take note of pages that have unique content that their searchers might find useful (i.e. your lenses). It piles all of these pages together and uses a bunch of ranking factors to pull out the best pages to present to users of the engines when they make queries.
If a spider can’t find your lens, it won’t be added to this pile of documents.
So, initially when we build lenses we want to create as many pathways (links) as possible for the spider to find our freshly published content.
Leveraging Squidoo’s existing structure to do this is by far and away the easiest way to have lots of pathways lined up for spiders to find your content.
Squidoo is being crawled constantly by google ( I shudder to think of the bandwidth bill Squidoo has for bots alone..) and as such you want to get in the path that the spider is wandering down.
What does every page on squidoo have? Tags.
Do spiders follow links to tag pages? Yes.
If you use tags that are used by many other lenses, is it more likely that your lens will be picked up quickly in the search engines? In my 1000+ lenses my experience is yes.
So,
DO
Use tags that are relevant to your lens topic
Use tags that are present on other lenses
TIP:
*For new lenses the sweet spot seems to be tags that are used on between 10 and 50 other lenses*
DON’T
Base your tags on some ‘keyword list’ unless that list was built off of squidoo tags, NOT some search log.
use too many long or unique tags unless you are building a lens cloud that will all use similar tags.
Questions?
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Comments
Thanks,
I created a len to be a back link to another len yet forgot to put tags on it, no wonder it wasnt indexed yet.
Excellent advice, Captain. I have one Lens at PR3 and another at PR4 so I assume what I`m doing must be working right.
Leave a comment
Captain,
Should you limit the times that you use the same tag in your list. Say you want to use the word ‘training’ with other words in your tag list.
thanks
David