Tag pages are once again indexable by the major search engines. Fluffanutta has an exceptional review of the changes and why the newly indexable tag pages are good so I am not going to re-hash WHY this is good.

Instead, I’d like to draw attention to a series of posts I’ve written in the past about how to take best advantage of tagging your lenses and how you can use it to focus and refocus attention, links, and traffic within your own little corner of the growing universe of Squidoo.

Techniques for Getting your Lens Indexed in the Search Engines -

• Why Links Matter for Indexing – A broad brush overview of what exactly links are and why they are important in getting you noticed on a very basic level.
• Using Proper Tagging to Build Backlinks on Squidoo Lenses – How to conceptually view your lenses’ tags so they can be search friendly and build links at the same time.

Squidoo Tag Theory -

• Visualizing Link Flow on Lenses – Where do the links on lenses go to and where do they come from? This post was written when discovery boxes and Groups were still around. I think the fact that they aren’t around (really) anymore only increases the importance of the remaining factors..
• The Magic of Squidoo Tag Pages - If you read one post on this list this might be the one. It answers the question of why paying attention to your tags matters.
• Why the Discovery Box used to be cool – This is post is not really applicable any more with the current state of the Discovery Box, but I think the principles are worth noting in order to get a better overall view of all the different ways tags are used internally at Squidoo.
• How to dominate a Tag Page – A few examples of how having well crafted tags can help you to become the leader in any topical conversation on Squidoo.. and potentially across the web.

This is truly a shame as I find that lens labels are perhaps one of the most useful aspects of the dashboard. They easily allow you to slice and dice your lenses into smaller groups and let you track cool things like the traffic that a particular subset of lenses is receiving.

So, for those of you that don’t really use lens labelling, here’s 5 reasons to start:

1. Sort by affiliate program - Create a separate label for Commission Junction, Pepperjam, etc. and place lenses that use each program under that label.
2. Lens Cloud labels (see ‘What is a Lens Cloud?’)- Every ‘cloud’ I make has it’s own label. Sometimes, i even have labels for sub-clouds etc. This cuts wayyy down on fishing around for the right lens.
3. To-Do – When I’m sitting down for a session of lens editing I always begin by assigning all the lenses I want to work on to a ‘pending’ type label. As I complete what I hoped to do for each lens, I remove it from that label.
4. Lenses can have multiple labels!
5. Tracking Lensrank – During some months, I’ll label every lens I have in the top tier with one label and every lens in tier 2 with a second label. Then, I’ll check it every week to see which lenses are rising or falling. This is great for helping me pick out trends that are occuring within my lenses.

A group of highly similar lenses that all have unique content related to one topical ‘theme’ or niche. These lenses are all connected to most or all of the other lenses in the cloud using either static or dynamic linking resources within Squidoo such as lensrolls, Discovery Boxes, Featured Lenses modules, Plexos, Link Lists etc.

While not required, many lens clouds have an associated overview page, similar to a lensography. This overview lens can range from being a resource itself to simply serving as a directory style area to easily link to other lenses in the cloud.

What exactly do you use a lens cloud for?

I’m going to expand on these more in the future, but at the very core, lens clouds enable you to target the audience you want while at the same time allowing you to maximize your penetration and visibility for many extremely long tail search queries.

Example:

here’s an example lens cloud about Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits. The ‘front page’ of the cloud links to each of the lenses in the cloud while internally, each lens is interlinked through the plexo as well as appearances in the explore more boxes.

Why you would build lenses like this:

The number of Tom Petty related keywords I rank for in this example is wayyyy higher than normally achieved with just one lens.

it looks good and is easier to browse through than just a single lens.

pageviews and advertising opportunities are obviously increased.

It’s profitable.

Why most people don’t do this:

It takes a lot of work initially.

Summary of Lens Clouds

Choosing how detailed you go is crucial to making this work correctly. If you did a cloud on Tom Petty and then built a lens for every single concert he ever performed that would probably be a bit overboard. However if your lead page is just ‘rock music’ that is definitely way to broad.

if all of your cloud lenses are going to have the exact same content this is a waste of your time. You are trying to get traffic for as many phrases as possible.

This type of lensbuilding model works really well if you set it up to scale easily. Learning how to do that is probably a post in itself but is really learned just by jumping in and doing it.

Hope you guys found this a little insightful, let me know what part of the process your are murkiest about in the comments and I’ll write a few follow-ups to help explain better.