10 Old School Rules for the New Age of Squidoo
Recently, after the demise of the Discovery tool and with Squidoo Groups having faded into (mostly) obscure places in the far reaches of Squidoo, an old stand by for optimizing your lens has re-emerged into viability - tagging your lens.
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.
- Lots of Squidoo SEO advice Stinks - Some of my pet peeves with lensbuilding that many people think are ‘best practices’ but are in fact loads of junk.
- Evergreen Modules and why they rock - What exactly evergreen modules are and why they should be a consideration when building lenses.
- My Definition of Unique Content - It’s not what you may think.
- Creating Lens Clouds - After you think you’ve got tagging down, build a few lens clouds if you want to get some really interesting results…
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Comments
What a great topic — tags! Who would have thought of what an important role the might play with getting our pages found. And, lens clouds — I’ve been a fan of text clouds for a really long time and am glad to be hearing more about them. I’m still in favor of that tool which I requested from thefluffanutta for the tag recommendations for our lenses — if while you are in the process of keying in tags, that they can turn colors — white, green, red — to designate optimal choices, why then NOT make the recommendation to the lensmaster on which would be optimal tags for the lens? Oh, I also love that feature with the + signs to show the keywords through searches that found your lens — and the ability to click on the plus sign to add that tag/keyword.
PS Are you getting ready for Halloween yet? 
Wow! I didn’t realize tag pages were getting indexed again. This is huge, as finding a tag page with some Squidoo authority will certainly help in terms of a internal linking in Google’s eyes.
Captain or anyone else - Are we saying that Squidoo Groups don’t work anymore or just that tagging is better than groups for building links/traffic?
I also remember the big ‘Tag and Ping’ thing a couple of years back - These things seem to be going in circles!
[...] ScalesAlright all you squids and squidettes hold on to your tentacles. The first lens by the…10 Old School Rules for the New Age of SquidooRecently, after the demise of the Discovery tool and with Squidoo Groups having faded [...]
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As expected, Great post, Captain Squid!
I’ll be injecting a Links Module, under my Review of your blog (….the #20 Spot on my lens….), so that I can link directly to some of your more popular blog posts/entries…
http://www.squidoo.com/my-treasure-chest-of-internet-websites
I’ll be sure to put this post in there, as well!
Howie
Lensmaster Extraordinaire