Posts Tagged ‘squidoo health check’

Okay, I admire Squidoo for what they’re trying to do – they’re trying to help a lensmaster out! And I agree, many people need the insight.

But please don’t let the tool rule when you’re making decisions or worrying about how well your lens is. I’ll show you why but first let me direct you to where the Squidoo Health Check is located:

Log into your dashboard and go to the My Lenses tab. When you hover over one of your lenses, you see the links listed directly below – and at the end it’ll say Health. Click that.

I’m going to walk you through the new Squidoo Health check for one of my lenses. This lens is currently #25 on all of Squidoo and #5 in the Shopping Category. I even misspelling the stupid URL when I was creating it but it does so well I didn’t have the heart to fix it once I’d noticed:

http://www.squidoo.com/infanstbabysnailhalloweencostume

Now before we go through the health check let me assure you this lens performs fantastically. I have over 1,200 hits a week, I’ve sold TONS of costumes and other stuff through it using both modules and direct Amazon Associates links, and it has 25 five star ratings!

So let’s see how my lens stacks up and I’ll explain why you shouldn’t worry about their Health check:

Lens Title: “Infant Baby Snail Halloween Costume - Perfect Outfit for a Boy or Girl!”
Needs Work: Whoops. Looks like your title’s got the sniffles. The best title is short and friendly and relevant to your topic. Think of it like a headline on a newspaper. Try a title that is 2-6 words long, and make sure it matches the content of your page.

Tiff’s comments: I beg to disagree. I get searches for baby boy costume and baby girl costume as well as the snail and infant costumes. I got all my keywords in there and it’s a relevant, interesting title that obviously pulls people in!

Lens Intro Title: “Baby Snail Costumes - A New Spin on an Old Trend” Good: Good stuff, Boss.

Tiff’s comments: Why thank you, Squidoo – I knew it was good

Lens intro: 91 words Good: The first impression is important. So your lens introduction is key. Nice work.

Tiff’s comments: To be honest, I was short on content here – how much can you say about an infant baby snail costume? So I normally use 250 words.

Intro photo: “pumpkinspaint” Good: The first good thing is that you have an intro photo uploaded. The next good thing is that the photo file successfully matches your lens title or one of your tags. Nicely done.

Tiff’s comments: I first assumed that the system read the file name to determine if it was relevant, but it must not, because many of my lenses have random file names for the image and it still says good job for relevancy. Anyway, make sure you have an intro image.

Primary Tag: “Baby Halloweeen Costume” Needs Work: Your Primary Tag doesn’t appear to be related to your lens. Either your Primary Tag does not match the content of your lens, or you need to add some more secondary tags to it. This helps people find your lens outside of Squidoo, as well as within Squidoo search. It also helps us find more relevant ads to run on your lens.

Tiff’s comments: Look what I did there: I misspelled Halloween! I used 3 Es – oops! This was a good catch Squidoo. HOWEVER – even AFTER I fixed it, Squidoo still said the same thing! So tell me the infant snail baby Halloween costume is not relevant to Baby Halloween Costume and I’ll eat a worm.

Last Published: 2008-09-16 17:12:31 Needs Work: Your lens hasn’t been updated in over a month. Remember: An fresh lens is a healthy lens. People (search engines too) like to know that they content they find is up to date.

Tiff’s comments: Yeah I know but I’m doing just dandy without it being freshened up.

Star Rating: by 25 people A-OK: Your lens has lots of very good star ratings. Rock-star.

Tiff’s comments: I agree.

Number of Tags: 27 Warning: Your tags need some work. Here’s the tricky part: Too MANY tags, and irrelevant tags, is no good. But only having 1 tag is also no good. Try this: Think of the 5 or 6 best keywords or keyphrases for this lens, and add them to your tag list. Delete the rest. We’re betting that will help.

Tiff’s comments: Talk about confusing! Poor lensmasters see 40 available spots and don’t know what to do. I did about half. Don’t sweat it. Forget tags altogether. I did mine way early on – this was not after I discovered tag pages were nofollow since January 2008.

Traffic (from the last 7 days): LOTS - WOOT! Your lens is on fire. Lots of traffic. Nice work.

Tiff’s comments: Yep!

Backlinks: Okay: - A few other sites (but less than 10) are linking to your lens.

Tiff’s comments: I could probably use this to build more backlinks but I don’t have any off-Squidoo Halloween pages. I could do some article marketing or something.

Module Titles: SquidHealth can’t check your modules automatically right now, but here’s an important tip: Do a quick scan of all your module titles, and make sure you don’t have any with the default text in them, like “New Amazon” or “New Guestbook.” The more you personalize your modules, the better.

Tiff’s comments: I agree with this! I HATE to see a module with the default text in the title. It bugs me. Lol

Point is – I have a nice, thriving lens that’s doing SANfranTASTIC and I got several shoddy health reviews as you can see. So don’t freak out if yours doesn’t show a green light for all of the Squidoo Health elements.

Tiff