Evelyn Saenz, one of my all time favorite lensmasters – because she makes just excellent lenses – is not really into SEO. I think she’s only just catching on (sorry Evelyn). Which makes her question relevant for a lot of people of course (what would a blogger do without newby questions?)
She’s just discovered the one tool every lensmaster should use who is serious about making the most of squidoo: The addon for firefox by Squidutils. And yes, that does mean you need to leave Internet Explorer behind for your day to day squidoo editing.
So here’s my how to edit squidoo tags for lensmasters like Evelyn. She’s a perfect example, because she works in a niche (homeschooling), she has many lenses (over 50) and has traffic to most of them (because they’re excellent and she generally writes her material very well). She probably has people linking to her stuff just because they found it and love it. So that part of SEO comes naturally to her. Which is precisely why she’s stumped on some of the details – after all, when traffic comes naturally, you don’t have to really learn anything new.
Introducing her lens about the fall – or autumn as that season is called in some versions of English. Her new title is based on advice we gave her in the forums. But now she’s stumped for the tags. Having just discovered the color coding of the tags that the squidutils addon produces, she worries that she’s not doing them well. And of course, sorry again, she is right. I’ll quote her question on this blog:
My list of tags now looks like a Christmas Tree with very popular tags in bright green such as math, audio books, and education whereas bright red ones include fun activities for fall, autumn educational activities and fall coloring pages.
So my question to you is:
Should I leave the red tags that less people are searching for or is it good to have a variety of popular and not so popular tags?
Your example is perfect. You have ‘autumn educational activities’ as a red colored tag. So, it’s not being used by anybody else, not even you. The thing to do is split it up. You can just have the tag ‘educational activities’ on there. Good chance you’re already using it on other lenses and if not, you should. You are already using the tag ‘autumn’ – so people searching for the precise phrase ‘autumn educational activities’ should be helped.
To optimize further for this phrase (assuming it’s popular) you should have ‘autumn educational activities’ in some of your module titles or subtitles. For optimization purposes there’s not much difference between tags and subtitles. And since tags are also useful to get links from related lenses, you should opt for subtitles over tags for unique phrases. Or in other words -as I told AJ:
With tags you want to go wide. With keywords you want to be specific.
With your number of lenses within one niche, you should be able to figure out what keywords and key phrases people are using a lot to find your kind of material. ‘Unit studies’ is only one example. I would expect homeschooling and learn at home as other options. But your stats, especially on your best traffic lenses, should give you a better idea. Make a spreadsheet to keep track of what works, and add those phrases to ALL your homeschooling lenses. That way they get interlinked through the related lenses feature automatically. And they’ll all be green too, because YOU are using them on several lenses.
No need to depend on what others are doing when you nearly own your niche. For instance: you can put the same tags about this being about a season in the year on all your lenses about seasons.
To further narrow it down, I usually automatically add the phrases people are searching for to find my lenses to the tags (you know, on the stats page). Then when it comes down to editing a lens, I will look at the red ones and shorten them till they are green. The color will refresh when you hit ’save tags’. This will also help prevent over repeating keywords in the tags. Over repeating keywords leads to ‘over optimization’ – aka: google thinking you’re trying too hard and punishing you for it.
Right now you have a lot of fall related phrases in your tags and no season related phrases at all. And since we’ve already seen that the word fall is not helping you at all (for the reason that it means too many things), all those tags need to be changed/shortened. It’s also violating the ‘no more than say 5 tags with the same word’ rule.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you so much. I have never seen tags, titles and sub-titles explained so well before. I love Fluffanutta’s new Addon for firefox by Squidutils and now with this excellent explanation I am off to re-tag and re-title with confidence.
Thanks for teaching us, Katinka!
Your new blog is wonderful! I subscribed.