Lens Health Check Tool

Q: Tell us about the Health Check tool. What is it all about?

A: Squidoo is a wonderful, flexible and powerful platform for publishing your content, but getting organic traffic to it is not always easy. The purpose of the Health Check tool is to pick up on some of the common mistakes that are made by new lensmasters.

Using some of the technology originally developed for Squidaholic, the Health Check Tool can review certain data about a lens. Specifically, it looks at the main factors that search engines care about, such as keywords in your titles, and gives tit bits of advice on how to improve them.

Q: How does it work?

A: Before we continue, it's important to note that the Health Check tool can't read the content on your lens to know what it's about. Instead, it uses the tags to tell it what the key words are. If you don't have enough tags, or you've chosen tags are that are not directly relevant to the subject of the lens, then the results will not be accurate. There is an optimal number of tags, which seems to be between 10 and 20.

The tool examines the lens and introduction titles, and checks that they are a suitable length and that at least one of your tags is mentioned in them. The same check is applied to the primary tag and the file name of the lens photo. The tool also checks to see if you have an introduction of reasonable length - not too long, not too short.

Other factors include how many ratings it has, how much traffic it gets, and how many other websites are linking to the lens. These are not things you can edit directly in the lens workshop, and tend to be performance indicators rather than ranking factors. If you're not getting the ratings, traffic and links you need, then spend some time interacting with the community. A good lens will be rewarded!

Q: How can I use it to make my lenses better?

A: If there's anything the tool thinks needs improvement, it will let you know with a little note. Using the advice it gives, you should be able to make some improvements to your lens.

Once you've grasped the basic principles of a 'healthy lens', you'll be able to apply them to new lenses as you build them. Keep an eye on the titles of your modules too - it's a good idea to work your keywords in to these too (and no one likes to see the default titles).

Q: It doesn't seem to match up with what I'm doing. What gives?

A: A common complaint is that the tool doesn't think the titles match the content, when they do. Usually, this is because one or two crucial words have been missed from the list of tags. Make sure that your primary tag appears in your list of regular tags as well.

After you've made some alterations to your lens, you may need to wait a while for the changes to be noticed by the Health Check tool. If it is continues to complain about something you know you've fixed, come back to it later. If you're still stuck, then you can always ask for help or critique in the forum.

Finally, please remember this is only an advisory tool. If there's an orange box that simply won't go green, or you don't understand/agree with the advice, don't worry about it. The opinion of the Health Check tool will not affect your ability to rank high, get traffic and make money (but it might help).

originally published on SquidU Review