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?

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.

The Most Visited Blog Posts on Captain Squid in 2008

Can Squidoo Make you $500 in one day? Yep. - This was a post to mark the first time that I ever earned $500 in one day with Squidoo. My Holiday season hasn’t been quite as juicy since then, but that was somewhat expected with the current content mix of my lens portfolio.

The Single Biggest Tip I Can Give Squidoo Lensmasters – This tip is a bit more motivational and attitude related than any specific thing you can do as a process to succeed on Squidoo. However, you guys obviously liked it as this was the second most visited post of the year. I’ll have to write more posts like these in 2009.

One Lens, One Month, $1,000 – This is another earnings milestone post, marking the first time that I earned $1,000 from a single lens in one month. To date, I’ve had 2 different lenses earn that much in a month so it can in fact be done and is not an isolated incident.

Making Money with Pepperjam – This popular squidoo affiliate marketing post gives a step by step guide on creating a lens to promote a Pepperjam Network affiliate product. Don’t miss the second part of the series where we talk about adding products to a lens from a Pepperjam Advertiser.

Don’t Listen to Bunk SEO Advice – Perhaps one of my personal favorites, I rail against the dumb labor intensive SEO that doesn’t really produce good results and try to shine a little light on some of the facts around employing good SEO practices in order to get the most bang for your buck with your time. When you have a couple hundred lenses, time becomes quite valuable and wasting it on things that don’t work is simply silly.

The Captain’s Personal Favorite Squidoo Posts of 2008

Here are a few  Squidoo nuggets that I think flew under the radar but have some valuable information that is worth reading.

A Guide to Squidoo Income – A lengthy post detailing the nuances of Squidoo’s income sharing structure and when payment takes place for various types of earnings. I hear this question so often that I had to put something out there I could refer people to.

8 Must Have Firefox Plugins for Squidoo – Get these if you haven’t already. I still use every one on that list constantly. I may expand this to 10 plugins next year sometime but these 8 are enough to really reduce wasted time when you are building lenses.

Using Tags on Squidoo – This was a three part series I wrote in April and May. Since Squidoo changes so fast, a few small points may be out of date here and there but I’m still a firm believer in using this strategy to increase lens visibility. Start with an overview of link flow, then learn a little more about how Squidoo tag pages (used to) work and how they still do before finishing up with learning how to leverage the ‘Discovery’ or ‘Explore More’ box on lenses.

Those are the 10 best blog posts from Captain Squid this year according to you the reader and how I was feeling about my personal favorites this morning.

Anyone else have any favorites I missed?

I want to expand a little bit more on a few of the ideas that Spirituality threw out there. Here’s a brief excerpt I want to talk about:

I’ve been thinking about this, because squidoo is a place where a lot of the links are dynamic: they stay up only as long as your lens has a high lensrank. Getting your lens into the top 100 for instance is great for several reasons – one of which is that it’s a great link to have. BUT it’s a temporary link if your lens doesn’t actually stay in the top 100.

The links to your lens through squidoo can update on a moment’s notice or they can update daily or over an even longer time period.  Squidoo is built on two or three primary drivers that help build links to individual pages.

The first factor built into Squidoo’s site architecture is Lensrank.  Lensrank controls the appearance of your lens on the top 100 lists, how high your lens appears on tag pages, and to a lesser extent, how often it appears on the ‘Explore Related Lenses’ box.

The second factor to consider with Squidoo’s on-site SEO is tagging. I wrote a huge tutorial on tagging with squidoo for a reason. Tags are directly controlled by the Lensmaster and they directly determine which tag pages your lens can appear on and which lenses your lens will show as a ‘related’ lens for.

The intersection of these two factors is that the order of the lenses that appear on tag pages are governed by Lensrank.

Now, when you have a lens that gets a good chunk of traffic, this can quickly become a self – reinforcing cycle. When your lens climbs the ranks it begins to appear on more tag pages which causes those tag page backlinks to increase in quality significantly, possibly sending you even more traffic.

However, if your lens is just starting out how do you get enough backlinks to catch the eyes of the search engines if you don’t already have the traffic? There are a few simple solutions.

Go after some ‘medium’ tags that only are used by 20-40 other lenses. These tag pages are awesome for lenses that need to get indexed because it’s easy to get on the front tag page for these terms within a day or two (usually).

Go after one or two ‘huge’ tags. The giant tags on squidoo like ‘music’ or ‘business’ can actually be helpful. I’ve noticed that the ‘explore related lenses’ area of lenses don’t always take the top lenses from the tags to display. Sometimes a few of the lenses will be from other lenses that are tagged similarly and have a Lensrank in the same range. This can get you a little more exposure on other lenses plus even the second and third page on some of those big tags can still get you a visit by the search engine.

What do you think of the Squidoo on-site SEO? What tips do you have for getting into the lensrank/tag cycle quickly?

Until recently, tag pages consisted of the majority of link flow that could be influenced within squidoo. However, with the recent release of the ‘Discovery Tool’ on lenses (that blue box that has related lenses in it) the possibilities have increased significantly.

The Discovery box on Squidoo displays a subset of other lenses from across Squidoo. Many people have viewed this in a negative light, thinking that this would drive traffic away from their lenses. However, many people are overlooking two major benefits:

1. If you’ve tagged your lenses well it should very easily bring in more traffic than it sends out.
2. You can control all of the lenses in the Discovery box.

What you say? All the lenses? Yep.

You are manually allowed to enter up to three lenses in the Discovery box. Don’t even mess around with that unless it’s for a very specific purpose. Dynamic links can be much more powerful in many instances. Instead, use the Discovery tool algorithm to your advantage.

The Squidoo Discovery Tool Algorithm Deconstructed

From my calculations the discovery tool is based on many things, but a few factors that show through are the following:

• Primary Tags
• # of tags in common
• Category
• Lensrank

I’m not going to reveal which ones I think are the most important, because a Pirate Captain needs to keep a few secrets . But with a little testing you should be able to figure it out yourself.

The Discovery tool truly provides the third leg for controlling squidoo link flow. I hope this little series has been of use to you all and I’d love to hear any questions about it.

Essentially, you can create a firefox bookmark that allows you to type ‘tag search+tag+here‘ into your Firefox address bar and instantly pull up the related squidoo tag page for that search term.

This is a great way to avoid having ’stranded’ tag pages that your lens links to.

Thanks for the great tip Drew!

Now that we’ve established where the links from lenses go to, lets discuss a little bit about how those Squidoo tag pages I crow about so much play into the whole system.

About Tags on Squidoo

The next two diagrams I’m going to show you assume a few things about the tag page. The first is that multiple lenses use that tag (10+). The second is that you use that tag on your lens and that tag is relevant. Having a lens about lemurs and using the ‘marketing’ tag just because lots of lenses use that tag isn’t going to do any good. Unless, of course, your lens is about how to market to lemurs .

Where do Squidoo Tag Pages get their links?

Every lens that uses a tag creates a link back to the front page of the related tag page.

Where do Squidoo Tag Pages Link to?

The First tag page accumulates all the ‘link juice‘ or ‘votes‘ from all the lenses that use that tag. It then distributes these ‘votes‘ among the top ten lenses for that tag as well as to the deeper pages for that tag. For example, the tag ‘Affiliate Marketing‘ has over 2400 lenses that link to the front tag page. That main tag page then distributes all of it’s accumulated link mojo to the 10 lenses on that page as well as the 247 other ‘affiliate marketing’ tag pages. This means there is a ‘trickle down’ effect where those lower tag pages still get some link mojo to distribute to the lenses on each page after the first.

What Happens when you use uncommon tags on Squidoo?

If you use ‘unique tags‘ like ‘best place to buy a new purple rabbit‘ or some such nonsense, you will end up with a lot of tag pages like this one. A single link between the lens and the tag page. Look less exciting? That’s because it definitely is. There are many fewer ‘votes’, fewer paths for the bots to follow to discover your lens, and less exposure overall for your lens.

The lesson in Squidoo Tags:

Pay attention to what kind of tags you are using. If you have a lot of ‘dead end’ tags on your lens, it’s probably affecting your lens negatively.

Next up:

Squidoo Link flow and the Discovery tool OR Why the new Discovery tool Rocks my Socks

However, there are some common lensbuilding and squidoo techniques that many people use that are just plain wrong. So, I thought that I’d debunk a few of those for you piratey squids this morning.

1. Squidoo RSS Feeds show google new information everytime someone visits - False -� the RSS feed is run on Javascript (AJAX), not php. Technospeak aside, this means that google can see your module title, description, and subtitle of RSS feeds. However, there are some Squidoo modules that will show different content to google every visit.
2. Excessive keyword tagging can hurt – Sometimes - I always recommend starting a lens with 8-15 keywords and then adding long tail terms as they are discovered. This is more about relevancy than number. I’ve got a lens with the full 40 keywords being used that is getting over 1k hits a week. I’ve got others where I’ve gone back and found I did a terrible job tagging them and only have a few tags that could be more relevant. worry about good relevant tags, not about having ‘too many good tags’.
3. You can’t make any money with Squidoo - If you believe this one you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog.. and whatever you do, don’t look here.
4. Google has Slapped Squidoo – Ahh the infamous ‘Google Slap’. Yes, a penalty was applied to Squidoo pages last July. Squidoo and Seth immediately set about beating up on some spam that had snuck into the system. They addressed the problem and traffic has been on the rise ever since August. Google is constantly changing its algorithm to rank on many different factors. I have some lenses that do great with google and some that don’t. Google is going to show what they think the most relevant search results are at the top of the pages. So, provide relevant content to your topic and Google will find your lens.
5. Gil’s Pony is the Secret to Lensrank - Actually, This one may be true…

-The Captain

Fluffanutta has written an exceptional article on Primary Tagging as a forum post. I’m going to repost it here after offering a few of my thoughts on Primary Tagging.

1) If your lens is about polka dotted teddy bears, I would just use ‘Teddy Bears’ as my Primary Tag. (as an example)

2) Primary Tags are going to be a careful balance between choosing a tag that has more than one or two lenses under it, but not choosing some of the most general tags on Squidoo (i.e. Marketing and Music should not be your primary tags)

3) Primary tagging has an effect on search results withing squidoo as well as on ‘tags’ pages. You can look at tags pages by either clicking on the ‘More Lenses About Primary Tag‘ link on the lens or by going to the Tag Cloud.

�Fluffanutta’s Initial Post: (Reminder: Check the Forum Post, the Follow-up Tips have been excellent also)

The Primary Tag is the first tag you get to define when creating your new lens, and it is an often misunderstood and very under utilised by many Lensmasters. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem do a whole lot, but there are some important points to note:

- In some lens formats (e.g. Ever.com and SquidWho) the primary tag appears at the very top of the page, next to “Explore more:”.

- Most lenses (maxxed) have a box in the side bar titles “Explore more…”, containing links to the Category and Primary Tag of the lens, plus all the groups it belongs too.

- Another feature of the sidebar (which is not always present) is the tag list, which is usually headed by the Primary Tag (on un-maxxed lenses), and then the first 5 regular tags (in alphabetical order). The remaining tags are hidden, and search engines may ignore these ones.

- Every appearance of the Primary Tag on your lens adds weight to that key phrase on your lens.

In addition, I am working on a new project that will make these Primary Tags even more important! So, you need to make sure that your these tags are as optimal as possible.

Here are some tips:

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, not dashes or underscores.

5. Make sure you repeat your Primary Tag as a regular tag too. The tags appear as the Meta Keywords at the top of the page, and you don’t want your key phrase to be missing from it.

6. 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.

Here are some examples: Doctor Who :: Discworld :: Digital Camera Accessories :: Smart Phones

Bad examples: The Whole Lens Title Again :: Kee Frase Spelt Wong :: lowercasewithnospaces :: “Phrase in Quotes”

I hope that people remember these tips – I need to go and change a lot of my own Primary Tags having just looked at a few of them. And remember – I’m developing a project that’ll bring these tags in to their own…

But here’s a little trick you may not know. When you start to try and tag a lens you can really get on a roll, pressing the ‘Tab’ key to cycle to the next keyword and tagging almost as fast as you can type (when you are doing the 10th or 15th lens in a niche, you pretty much know most of your tags already). This works great until you get to the end of the list. Now you have to Stop. Use the mouse to manually click ‘add’ a few (or a lot) more times before you can continue tagging.

�Don’t worry, I found a better way.

It used to be that if you were editing tags and pressed the enter key your tags would be saved and you would have to go back into edit mode. Now, when you are editing tags, and press enter, it will automatically add a new tag box.

This may seem small, but as more and more squidooers become Power Users and start building hundreds and hundreds of lenses, it’s little things like that that will save you real time.

Now if HQ would only let you import a tag list instead of entering them all manually…. (probably to easy to spam)

-The Captain