Megan Casey announced the new check tool on SquidBlog a couple of days ago. If you are a Squidoo user you’ll find the tool on your lensmaster dashboard, under My Lenses. Float your mouse over the lens you want to check and follow the link marked ‘health’.

The new health check has a few differences to other versions out there…

The recommendations on tags are quite different and include some very good tips. You should only choose a handful of simple, relevant tags for your lens. Many people have blogged and written about this in the past and the recommendation has often been to include as many tags as possible (Squidoo allows 40) and to stuff them full of all the long tail keyword variations you can think of.

It makes sense to simplify your tags though. They provide referral paths from other lenses so you need to choose tags which are used by other people on Squidoo. If your tags are too long and complex, you won’t find any other lenses sending you traffic.

There are also good recommendations on the primary tag. This is clearly used by Squidoo to determine what ads to place on your lens, so again, should not be too long and complex. The primary tag should also reflect the subject of your lens.

I also like the tips about renaming your lens modules so they don’t keep their default headings. This helps to differentiate yourself on search engines and also helps your lens readers to understand what you’re talking about. This is a good thing!

If you’ve used the css background technique to create a nice image background for one of your Squidoo lenses, I’ll add it to the Top 15 list on my Squidoo CSS Background lens.

CSS Background is a style feature that allows you to add a variety of backgrounds behind the text on a web page. You can choose solid colors, or if you feel like being artistic, you can add an image.

This is a great way to spice up your web pages or Squidoo lenses. You can use it for the main body of your text – imagine a story about a beach holiday, displayed over a beautiful ocean background.

Another place where this gets used is to put simple graphics behind navigation links. These will usually be small pictures that repeat to build an attractive navigation bar.

On Squidoo you can build a link voting plexo, where visitors can add their own suggestions for links, then vote for their favorites. I’ve found this is a great way to interact with your visitors and to give them the chance to send you some feedback.

There’s space for 15 links right now. Closing soon!

Sounds like one of those cheesy internet marketing ads doesn’t it?

I’m happy to say that this is real though. It’s happened to 3 of my lenses on Squidoo. Oh, and I now have a few PR3 lenses too, so it’s not just a one-off. You can check them all out via my Squidoo lensmaster page

OK. Enough bragging. Why is this good and why should you care about it and how can you do the same?

If you’ve never heard of Squidoo here’s the five second introduction: you get to build a lens (= a page) on any subject you like. Free. You tag it and promote it within Squidoo and it gets rated with a LensRank score. Successful lenses get the benefits of lots of focused traffic and high Google PageRank.

There’s also a Top 100 list. My CSS Background lens is #74 today, so it gets lots of exposure and traffic (another reason to brag by the way. Sorry. I’ll stop now. )

So you should care about this because it can get you a lot of targeted traffic. Targeted traffic equals focused visitors which you stand a great chance of converting to real customers.

You also get a share of Squidoo’s high Google PageRank. The ‘link juice’ flows from the Squidoo site (it has PR8 today) and down into the successful lenses. A high PageRank gets you a high position in Google’s search results and therefore a greater number of organic search visitors.

Things have definitely improved since my first attempts on Squidoo

In short, it’s all good. Now how can you do it?

1. Choose a good niche with decent traffic and low competition. Define some keywords.
2. Try to choose a subject that’s interesting to people who hang around Squidoo
3. Create a high quality lens, full of interesting content, good layout and some nice pictures
4. Choose your Squidoo tags carefully to match your chosen keywords
5. Get promoting!!

Sound easy? I reckon you can do it too. The real trick here is to build something that’s useful, interesting and the highest quality you can make it. Why not have a go?

One of the challenges in marketing your website (or blog, or Squidoo lens) is to make yourself different and to stand out from the crowd. One way to do this is to use stunning images, just like this amazing picture of TableTop Mountain in South Africa.

This post certainly sticks out!! It uses a technique called CSS Background, where the image is used as a background to the paragraphs of text. You can find out how to do this on my CSS Background Squidoo Lens.

There’s an additional technique here too. The paragraphs use a fine array of dots to darken them over the blue sky background. This produces a semi-transparent effect which helps the text to stand out. The text here is white, which looks pretty good. I’ll post the code for this here in a day or two.

Can you think of more ways to make yourself stand out from the crowd?

This is a nice endorsement of my work. I love writing stuff that other people like – who doesn’t?

It’s also proof of the principle: good content beats SEO.

In other words, create something that people love, or find useful, or enjoy reading, and you don’t really need to worry about keyword density, long tails or meta tags. Why? Because if people love your work they will (re)visit it and vote for it by linking to it. Links to your stuff are hugely important for PageRank: lots of links will get you higher in the search positions.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s still important to think about SEO. We’re working in a competitive world, after all, and everything you do to get yourself an edge is (probably) useful.

There’s a limit to how far you can go with SEO though. Instead of spending hours optimizing your new page, or blog post, or Squidoo lens, get started on creating another one.

Make sure it’s good though!

It’s a great place for building focussed content and promoting it. Squidoo rates pretty high in Google and your pages can appear high up in search results.

It’s pretty easy to set up a lens and build some content, but making it successful and getting a good lens rank is a little bit harder. You can make some money if visitors click on the AdSense links which feature on your lens. This is what happened today!

I do know a Giant Squid and you can check out some of her lenses at EverythingMouse on Squidoo. A Giant Squid award is given by the folks at Squidoo to someone who creates top notch lenses (and lots of them). I’ll be following her lead as I develop more lenses and get started on promoting them.