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!