Stats and Tags

[Joan]

In looking at my stats on a lens, I can see the search phrases people have used to find the lens. I click on the pluses, but I never see them added to my tags. Am I wasting my time? Do yall do that?

[EelKat]

I click to add most of them too. I noticed though, that if the lens has reached it's 40 tag limit that the new search tags I clicked on do not get added though.

[thefluffanutta]

I generally only add a few of these search phrases to my tags. Short 2-3 word phrases are the best ones to add, as there's no point adding the 'long tail' keywords. I also only include tags that are directly relevant to my lens, and try to avoid different combinations of the same words.

While you can add up to 40 tags, it's best to aim for about a dozen (10-15).

[Joan]

Thank you - that is good to know. I think I have seen you say that before re the 10-15. But then someone else says "go for all 40" and I go off in that direction for a while. Sometimes it is just hard to know what to do. Will double check to be sure I am under 15 and try to stay there. As always, many thanks!!

[John Dilbeck]

Good afternoon, Joan.

In a situation like this, I'd pay attention to what thefluffanutta says. He knows what he's talking about, and I'm not sure that can be said for others.

Act on your dream!

JD

[thefluffanutta]

10-15 is not a strict rule, and you can have more if you really want to. However, the Health Check Tool seems to think that less is more, so HQ must know something we don't.

If search engines see a lot of tags (e.g. 40) that are all very similar, then they could penalise the page for 'keyword stuffing'. Seeing as search engines don't pay much attention to tags anyway, it's perhaps best to err on the side of caution.

[Joan]

for sure i don't need any penalties..........whew...........thankful for your advice!

[Janelle Kleppin]

OK, now y'all have got me wondering if my information is accurate. I won't be able to rest until I've reassured myself that I'm not confused.

My current understanding is that the tags we can enter on the lens in the right hand column are only used by Squidoo search and for the similar lens part below the introduction, while the search engines like Google use the introduction which functions as meta tagging in the source code for the lens.

To answer Joan's original question, though, I did click a lot when I was starting, but now I hardly ever even look unless I'm trying to tweak an introduction. I've noticed that lens rank doesn't always have much to do with visits - I've got lenses with more google visits than higher ranked lenses have, and greater total traffic stats. The big difference I see is updating - older lens with higher traffic ranks lower than newer lens more recently updated.

[Michaela Cernescu]

Hi At this point the tags are important for your rank within Squidoo, not for your rank in Google, some people start to neglect them, but for me my rank in Squidoo is important, it is telling me if I am doing a good job and produce some traffic because people are looking to high rank lenses.
Michey