Religion and Spirituality lenses (and more)

I’ve been playing around with the new lens health check at squidutils. It really is a great tool. It gives you the basics of real SEO (search engine optimization) for your lenses. Getting links, researching key words, creating headings that work. [if the word SEO is new to you, or you don’t know much about it, check out my introduction into SEO articles.

Granted: it really is only the basics. For instance module titles aren’t taken into account here, nor is over optimization (getting too many keywords in your copy).

Most of the tool is pretty self explanatory. But the feature I’ve fallen in love with is pretty well hidden. It’s called ‘check tags’, and is right under ‘number of tags’. Even if the tool says the number of tags is fine, go check out the tags. What you want is a high percentage of ‘good’ or even ‘great’. But for lower ranking lenses the best you can hope for is a good percentage of ‘okay’.

I’ve really fallen in love with the capacity to check your tags. So my tip of the day is: even if your lens gets an ‘okay’ for tags, check them in the tool. Okay just means you have a good number of tags.

Now you see your current stats on tags: you will probably see a lot of orphan tags, especially if you’ve been clicking on ‘add tag’ on your stats page a lot. The first thing to do is to check the highest ranking tags, and look at the other lenses ranking there. Go check out the lenses most related to yours and see what tags they use. Pick the ones that fit your lens and use them to replace the ‘orphan’ tags.
What you want to end up with is a lens with just a few orphan tags (say 5).

The ‘no link’ label. This means that the tag is so popular that your lens doesn’t end up on the first page of the search for that tag in squidoo. Don’t delete it just yet. If your lens does come up on the second page, you just might be able to increase your lens rank enough to come up on the first page. Also: if your lens is really very related to that topic, or you have a lot of other lenses on that topic: keep the tag in. You’re still in the neighbourhood of those other lenses. But try and keep the amount of ‘no link’ tags below 5 as well.

With some keyword research within squidoo you can end up with a lot less orphan or no-link tags than you had before. This has the advantage that your lens is more likely to end up in the ‘Explore related pages’ section on other peoples lenses. It also means that your lens gets to be on more tag pages that other lenses link to. Orphan pages are tag-pages that have only your lens on them. Pretty lonely. You don’t want to be lonely.

Still, keep a few of those orphans: the ones that really fit your subject should stay in. Especially if you’ve gotten significant traffic from that key phrase or you’ve found it in a keyword tool.

A few extra tips:

1. Start with optimizing your lens with the highest squidoo rating. That’s where you can make the most progress. It is likely to rank high enough on those tag pages to get ‘great’ or ‘good’ labels with those tag pages. It’s not that lower ranking pages shouldn’t be optimized like this: they absolutely should. But start with the big guns.

2. When you are playing around with the tags: sometimes the tool can’t keep up with your changes. So if it reports that there is no link on the first page - wait a day or so. Perhaps it does then.

3. Squidoo has a tendency to mix up the keywords we put in lenses. This is a drag, especially if you’ve just spent a lot of time optimizing your keywords. The solution: do a backup after you’ve optimized your keywords.

4. If you use firefox, much of this is also accessible through a greasemonkey script.