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I have a number of Squidoo Lenses, some get a fair amount of traffic and some don’t. I’ve recently learned that there a number of things you can do for Squidoo Lens Optimization.

I have one lens, that’s not in the internet marketing arena, did surprisingly well. This lens was getting a fair amount of traffic everyday and made me a little money.

It didn’t make me a lot of money because I think it’s in a niche made up of people who are wanting information and help for free.

Anyway, this Squidoo lens was doing very well, but started slipping over time. I really didn’t do much to keep the traffic up on the lens and just figured others had entered the same market and had pushed me down in the search engines.

It was no big deal since this market is not good at spending money. As a side note, there is a lesson here - you need to research markets to determine whether people are spending money or not before you do too much work.

Determining if people are spending money or not, is too much for this post, perhaps I’ll talk about it later.

Since this lens is not a great money maker, I’ll let you have a look at it. It’s all about sinus infection symptoms. Not very exciting, but something I have to deal with once or twice a year.

I had pretty much given up on this lens, until I came across a free, cool Squidoo tool that helps you optimize your Squidoo lens.

I don’t remember all the changes I made, but I do remember something very important I learned about optimizing Squidoo lenses.

You probably know that you can add tags to your Squidoo lens. In case you didn’t know, your Squidoo dashboard contains stats, including suggested tags.

These are tags that were used by people searching for certain terms, and these terms (tags) lead them to your lens. Here’s how Squidoo explains it - “These tags, or keyword phrases, delivered your lens to searchers. See one you haven’t used? Add it to your lens.”

Every time I saw one of these suggested tags with a “+” next to it, I added it to my lens. What I didn’t realize was that you can only add 40 tags to your Squidoo lens. So, I was adding tags that were really no good. I was adding very long tail tags that would probably never be searched on again, and I used up my 40 tags.

I continued to believe I was adding tags, but they weren’t being added and I didn’t realize it - oops!

The Squidoo Optimization tool made it clear that I only had 40 tags, and I could see that many of them were junk. So I removed many of the bad tags and by using my Squidoo Dashboard stats could determine better tags to be using.

With the new tags, and changes the Squidoo optimization tool directed me to make, I was able to resurrect this lens. That lens was getting about 90 hits per day at its peak. Then it dropped to about 5 a day. Now it’s back up to about 40 a day and growing.

Plus, my lens is now #111 in Health & Medicine - not bad for a lens that gets little attention. I just wish people spent money in this niche.

Anyway, I used the Squidoo optimization tool on all of my lenses, and every one of them needed some changes. So, I suggest you run your Squidoo lenses through this Squidoo tool.

Mike