Jodie

jpetalss last blog post..I Am very Sorry

Yup, that phrase appears twice. I manually entered it as a tag, and then Squidoo adds it to the bottom of the lens because it is a tag (and yes, they also add tags to the meta keywords on the page source).

I completely understand (and agree) about tag pages, but I was responding to whether tags were still useful in their own right. Many folks have become confused and have thought that tags are useless because of recent discussions on the topic.

Of course it was totally “easy” to rank for a phrase that never existed on the internet before, but I had to choose something that was easy to test and track to show some basic results so others could make a decision or do their own tests to see if tags are still useful for THEM.

Yes, you totally need more than a few tags to get good results from a lens, but tags can help… and in my opinion, Squidoo tags DO still have some SEO benefit in the SERPs

And boy oh boy, in todays competition, we need all the help we can get, don’t we?

Thanks for reading! Love hearing your input!

Jennifer
~PotPieGirl

The phrase you targeted appears twice on your lens; once in the side bar and again at the very bottom as a ‘Related topic’. Given that you have zero competition for this phrase, getting the lens to appear in the search results is no challenge. (The tag also appears in the meta keyword data, but Google ignores that).

It is important to make the distinction between ‘tags’ and ‘tag pages’, as they are not the same. Tag pages are lists of lenses that share the same tag. These pages used to appear in the SERPs and acquire PageRank, thereby passing traffic and PR to the top 10 lenses for each tag. Not any more.

Tags are still useful (see my latest post), and they do make an appearance on your lens adding to the weight of your keywords. However, you’ll need more than just a couple well chosen tags to get a lens to rank well in today’s competition.

thefluffanutta

thefluffanuttas last blog post..Making the Most of Squidoo Tags

Really enjoy reading your blog & lenses.

I agree, and you make a good point. That phase being anywhere on the lens would lead to it showing in the SERPs for that query.

However, would you agree that it appears that search engines (namely Google) give more weight to words/phrases that they find as a text link on a web page?

Thanks for reading, Lewis… Love having you around!

Jennifer
~PotPieGirl

The thing is that the text ‘potpiegirl is really smart’ is on the lens, but there isn’t anything special about it being a tag. It isn’t getting any power from being a tag compared with being just written into the text or put in a module sub-heading. I see your point though! They have ranked you for the term that appears only in a tag box. Because google doesn’t follow the tag links, all it’s seeing is the phrase in the sidebar. So it would make more sense to put the tags in module sub-headings or just at the bottom of text modules. Interesting experiment.

I am going to conduct some experiments on some different stuff!

With every post here I say to myself ‘I knew it was a good idea to subscribe!’ 🙂

Lewis

Lewiss last blog post..FINALLY: Why Squidoo Tags Are Useless