In his post about the best squidoo lens directories, thefluffanutta gave a few hints about how lenses get shown in his own squidoo directory.
He had done a post about how to pick the best primary tag a few months ago, but not until I read this latest post did it finally click for me…
For instance: the squidoo directory uses primary tags as the main way to create subdirectories under each squidoo category. Only primary tags that get used three (3) times or more will get their own subcategory. This means primary tags should not be unique to your lens. They should instead be more general. Guess what TheFluffanutta says about primary tags in his post earlier …
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.
7. Group related lenses under the same Primary Tag – this creates strong links between them, and helps them all to rank well for the target key phrase
Those were the last two tips he had on the subject, but they really were the most important ones (though I didn’t realize this earlier).
Why? Because on squidutils the primary tags determine which lenses get shown with their picture in a certain category.
Say you are interested in religion and spirituality. You look up the squidoo directory category religion and spirituality. 
shocker: you will only see four key words. This means most people don’t use primary tags that get repeated on other lenses. All those Christian lenses? Not using the word ‘Christ’ or ‘Christianity’ or ‘Jesus Christ’ as their primary tag (yes, giving tips to the competition here ).
You can bet I’ve been making sure my primary tags get more generic. I’m going to be checking each and every lens. Of course one way to make sure a tag becomes listed there is simply making sure three lenses share that same tag. So all my lenses about Buddhism will have Buddhism as a primary tag soon. My philosophy of religion lenses will have the same primary tag soon, though I haven’t decide what yet.
I don’t know what you all think about this, but since the squidutils site is one of the best linked sites in the squidoo network, I want my lenses listed in there.
One other thing I spotted when going through the directory: if you don’t know what primary tag to pick, why not just go for a primary tag that’s a copy of the name of the category? For instance ‘squidoo tips’ in the directory ‘squidoo tips’. Or ‘books’ in ‘books’. That doesn’t quite work for every category, but it will once people start doing that often .
[One other thing: to get into the squidoo directory hosted on squidutils you have to have at least one vote on your lens.]
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Hmmm. Well, I guess my first step is to find out more about the SquidUtils site
I’ve been there twice in the past year but can’t say I’ve given it the deserved “look over” it needs…