Squidoo Healthcheck: Check the Health of Your Lenses

I've spent the last few days running health checks on my Squidoo lenses. The "healthcheck" feature was once built into the website tools on the lensmaster dashboard. At some point, the Squidoo site quit sponsoring the healthcheck feature. One of Squidoo's top lensmasters "TheFluffaNutta" has the tool available on his site: http://squidutils.com.

The healthcheck feature can make a huge difference in your lens performance. Running the check and correcting the problems brought my average lensrank up 40,000 points. For those of you that actively write for Squidoo, you know lensrank is everything! It determines your tier and how much you are paid each month.

By running the healthcheck on each of my lenses, I learned which mistakes I was making. These mistakes were interfering with my traffic. Here are the most common problems I uncovered when running my health checks and sprucing up my lenses:

1. Your primary tag (the first one entered) should be limited to three words.
2. Have at least 20 relevant tags. If you have less, keep thinking. A lens without enough tags doesn't have the keyword density it needs to be found.
When running the healthcheck having too few tags will make your title, subtitle, etc light up as needing corrected. It will say they aren't relevant to the tags, but the problem isn't the titles, it's too few tags. It can easily be corrected by ensuring you have 20 relevant ones.
3. Ensure photos in your intro paragraph have at least two words from your primary tag.

That's the lesson of a Squidoo healthcheck. Save yourself some time by keeping these things in mind and you won't have to go back and edit your lenses later, like I did.