Religion and Spirituality lenses (and more)

Well – I guess I’m kind of obsessed… I woke up this morning realizing I had dreamed about beating someone up over tags. I think that means I’m being hard on myself over tags. It might also be a hint: beat people up over tags!

Yet – I’ve gone on record saying tags aren’t that important. Seeing how squidoo newbies or longtime amateurs deal with tags has made me change my mind. I DO think tags are important. I just don’t think they are the only SEO people should do.

I guess that got the disclaimer out of the way.

The fact is – SEO is in the details. There is a reason why librarians are said to make excellent SEO specialists: they revel in details. They don’t mind weeding through keyword lists, link reports and potential link candidates.

On squidoo tags are the first detail to pay attention to – right after making the lens itself obviously. Some people even start with their tag list BEFORE making the lens.

The related lenses feature as a thermometer

The first thing I do after making a new lens is take a look at the ‘related lenses’ feature. It gives a very good first impression on how you are doing on your tags.
Do the lenses that show up have anything to do with your lens topic? If so – great, you had a good start.
If not: click through to the ones that do. Or do a quick squidoo search for your general topic. Find the lenses that best fit your topic. Look at their tags and copy any that fit your topic as well.

I usually stop at 5 lenses. But depending on your topic you might go on to 10 or even 20.

Why is this important?

Your newby lens does not have any backlinks yet. Your next step will be (I hope) to give it some links yourself, but in the meantime the ‘related lenses’ feature gives your lens the only backlinks it has.

While you’re at it – make sure you’ve signed up for squidutils. Their directory is just about the easiest directory to get listed in. The steps?

1. Sign up there.
2. Make sure your primary tag is used by at least 3 other lenses (by lensmasters in the squiddirectory)
3. Give your lens an introduction picture

When I became aware of how the squiddirectory works the Religion and spirituality section had only 3 or 4 subdirectories. Now it has a whopping 11. I think it’s fair to say at least 7 of those were created by yours truly: by simple smart primary tag manipulation.

Once you’re a big player in a niche – you can do that: simply create a subdirectory in the squidirectory by having three lenses with the same primary tag (they do have to be listed in the same squidoo topic as well though).

Anyhow – tags ARE important. Use the related lenses feature to determine whether you were at least reasonably close in choosing them. Then finetune.

More about squidoo SEO.