Secrets Behind a Remarkable Squidoo Lens Title

It's the main heading for your lens, displayed at the top (in orange big letters, depending on the theme you use). You set it during the first menus when you start a lens, and you can change it anytime as part of the intro module.

Did you know that your lens title is the most important part of your lens for SEO?

That's why it's vital to choose a good one. Or, putting it another way, if you don't get your title right, there's no point trying to tweak all the other stuff such as content keywords, tags, alt text on images, and so on.

Your lens title is used by Squidoo to set the HTML title meta tag and also the main H1 tag in the code for your lens. These are well known as the most important tags used by Google when they rank your lens for search results pages.

If you're not convinced by this, take a look at a search results page that includes one of your lenses (hopefully you've got some!) Try this example. Notice how the lens titles are shown in bold and underlined in blue? Are you convinced now?

The lens title is probably the first thing readers notice when they visit your lens. OK, so they might notice a stunning picture or an advert first, but it'll be a close second. Your readers will spend 0.453 seconds checking out the title (approximately) and deciding whether it's something they want to read further, so it's got to be good.

Lens titles are shown in other places in Squidoo too, like your lensmaster page, search results and tag pages. It might even pop up in a Top 100 if it's doing well. So again, it's important to make sure your title is interesting and relevant so that people follow these links to your lens. Why? Because this means more visitors, which means more clicks on adverts and more LensRank!!

Hopefully I've convinced you it's worth thinking about this. A lens title is good if:

• it's super-relevant to whatever a reader is looking for


• it's punchy and compelling


• it's not too long and waffly


• it matches the subject of the lens exactly

Let's take a look at each one of these

This means it uses words or phrases that your reader has in mind - usually called keywords. So, if they are looking for apple sauce recipes, the lens title is 'my favorite apple sauce recipes', or some variation. If the title is banana recipes, this isn't so good because it's not relevant, and if the title is just 'apples', that's not specific enough.

But wait - how do you know what people are looking for? The simple answer is you don't, but you can get smart and do some research with a keyword tool like Wordtracker or Google AdWords. Also, if your lens is featured on another relevant web page, such as 'best fruit recipes', you can bet that at least some of the readers of that page are going to be interested. A little detective work and some lateral thinking can get you a long way here...

This happens if the lens title grabs people's attention and says 'read me or else...' For the apple example, you could do this by using words like 'best', or 'my favourite', or 'top 10'. Or, how about 'secret apple sauce recipes your mother never told you about'. OK, that's a bit cheesy, but you see what I mean.

People have a short attention span these days and really don't want to read a title that's too long. So it's best to steer clear of 'apple sauce recipes that I found last week while browsing in the bookshop'. Another reason for this is that search engines like Google only display the first 74-ish characters of a lens title in the search results (*). If your title is too long, part of it may get chopped off and this could be the best part of your masterpiece!

Why is this important? Surely when people have arrived at your lens and decided that the title is good, that's enough?

Not quite.

If your lens doesn't 'deliver' and provide enough interesting content for your visitors then (a) you're not helping them and (b) they will probably hit their brownser back button and then (c) Google will notice that visitors don't think much of your writing. This is a fast-track way for your lens to start dropping down the search results, and I'd bet a dollar this is a factor for Squidoo lensrank too.

So - make sure your lens content matches the title. Use the keywords you've chosen for the title and write around those. Don't fill it full of spam or irrelevant rubbish.

(*) Remember the 74 Characters Limit?

This is kind of an official number for Google, but they don't generally chop words in half and they tend to favour shorter titles unless it's a very long-tail search. Feel free to ask me about this one...

What about backlinks? Aren't they important for search and SEO?

Definitely. Probably just as important or more, but links are referred to as off-page factors. This means (a) they are not on your lens and (b) you can't directly control them - apart from your own promotional links that you collect yourself by blogging, bookmarking, lensrolling etc

Remember I said that you can edit your lens title anytime within the intro module? It's not set in stone. This is a good thing, and it means there's no excuse for settling for a less-than-average title. If you don't like it or think it's underperforming - change it! If you feel like getting a bit more technical you can even run some limited testing on your title. It's not too scientific but it is a little complex to explain - contact me for more details.