I was working on my new National Geographic group at Squidoo, when I discovered something that made my head swim. (At the time) A Squidoo search for "National Geographic" turned up about 35 results, fully 1/3 of them my own pages. Could this be right? Obviously not -- I had already noted A LOT of National Geographic related content and products at Squidoo, which was part of my reason for starting the group.

I searched Google for "National Geographic" site:squidoo.com and got about 800 results. That was more reasonable, but why such a discrepancy? On about the second SERP (Search-Engine Results Page) I got a clue: the listing for Squidoo : Tags : national geographic. Clearly that had something to do with it.

If the National Geographic example is any indication, tags must be the most misunderstood and neglected feature at Squidoo by far! So let's just go over the mechanics of tagging a lens for any lensmasters who may not know how.

Go to the "edit" page for the lens you're working on. In the right-hand column you'll see a heading "Tags" and to it's right a button, "Edit." Click on the edit button. A list of tags will appear, (If you haven't done this before, it will be a very short list.)

At the bottom of the list, you'll find a button reading "Add More Tags." Click on that and one space will appear at the bottom of the list. Add a keyword that describes your page to that space, then repeat the process for as many keywords as you can think of. When you're done, click the "Save" button.

You're almost done. You still have to click "Publish" in the upper or lower right corner of the page for your new tags to take effect.

See also: "Squidoo Popular Tags" in Stupid Squidoo Tricks

I don't have any special knowledge about the workings of Squidoo's server software, so the following is partly speculation, and could contain some inaccuracies, but as we say in the Superior Squadron, "Unlikely."

When you save your tags, the Squidoo server goes down your list and one-by-one it compares your tags to a list of known tags. If it finds your tag, it adds your page to the list of pages with that tag. If not, it creates such a list and adds your page. Sooner or later, those lists will be sorted, presumably by lensrank, but that needn't concern us here.

The tags are also added to your lens in the HTML header using a keyword "meta" tag.

These lists are used to create "tag" pages -- probably on-the-fly, but the mechanism isn't really significant in this discussion. Google returns about 159,000 of these pages, that's 159,000 chances for your lens to have a Squidoo "tag" page point to it -- if you think of a new tag, make that 159,001.

Tag spammers pick out the tags they think will boost ther rankings, regardless of whether they have anything to do with their content or not. The fact that the tags don't correspond to the content is what makes it "SPAM."

If you read the article at the "keyword 'meta' tag" link above, you already know that no major search-engines use this tag because of it's potential for abuse. Not so Squidoo search, which appears to depend entirely on tags. This would explain why Squidoo search turns up so few "National Geographic" lenses -- people didn't add a "National Geographic" tag.

Is it any wonder Squidoo search produces such poor results? Squidoo LLC actually pays people to use these disreputable practices, then tries to "jawbone" them into refraining from such tactics. (I can hear the howling and denial at "Squid U" now.)

Unfortunately, these tag-spammers, one-star raters, and blank-lens SEO "experts" aren't violating the Squidoo Terms of Service, which is all they are contractually obligated to do. ( A lawyer friend of mine is of the opinion that the self-contradictory "item 10" casts even that into doubt. Is that why you don't find a lot of jokes in legal documents?)

Squidoo should save their breath and build a more robust "Lensrank" system -- they're pretty much "out of gas" when it comes to extracting proper netiquette from the people they are paying to flaunt it.

Now, I'm not advocating tag spam. I'm far more concerned about the Google PageRank of my lenses than LensRank. After all, there's no compelling reason for lensmasters to buy anything from me, so what do I care about Lensrank?

Sure, it's part of the secret formula for computing AdSense revenue, but my direct payments from Squidoo are "chump change" compared to the amount of work that goes into generating them and to my Amazon associate commissions.

The proper goal of SEO isn't merely to increase traffic, but to increase well-targeted traffic. People who are looking for "thirteenth century B.C. Etruscan pottery" and instead get "HOT TEEN SLUTS!!" are usually a hard sell.

It is not my purpose to write a tag-spam how-to, even though -- as I've pointed out -- there is nothing "wrong" with tag-spam, at least in terms of being illegal or contractually prohibited. On the other hand, I do want this to reach a wide audience, and perhaps demonstrate that these "grey-hat" techniques can be effective.

I'll count the experiment a success if this lens reaches the top 500. I think it could potentially go a lot higher. Of course, being even vaguely critical of Squidoo is a sure-fire one-star rating magnet, so who knows? (That always makes me wonder just how sincere the Squidoo staff is about those "Don't abuse the rating system," admonitions. Somebody's handing out those stars!)

Below are some tags I think will boost this lens' lensrank. It will be interesting to see if Google considers it spam, but in theory, these links to real Squidoo tag pages are legitimate content, and should be O.K. In fact, this is substantially similar to the Squidoo tag cloud, but in a format thats easier to cut and paste.

The best thing lensmasters can do about all this is to tag their lenses with every relevant keyword they can think of. This is apparently the only way they can get their fair share of Squidoo search traffic.

If even a small percentage of Squidoo's tens of thousands of lensmasters properly tag thir lenses, tag-spam will be far less of a problem.

Remember that far more people use Google and other popular search engines than use Squidoo search, so properly tagged lenses will get more traffic, increase in lensrank, and eventually crowd the tag-spammers out of their high lensrank positions.

Another very effective trick is to get a toolbar for your favorite search engine. I use the Google toolbar, not because Google is necessarily the best search available, but because it is far and away the most popular. Doing well in Google is very important in terms of generating traffic.

If you want to find pages only at Squidoo, add "site:squidoo.com" to your search (without the quotes.) I deliberately didn't say "lenses," because Google will find a lot of other pages on the Squidoo site besides the user-generated lenses. This "site:..." search term works for most search engines and their toolbars.

Using a toolbar will not only help you to find more content, but the more robust indexing will help to eliminate a lot of the "spammier" lenses.

After you've added all the relevant tags you can think of -- (NOT just ones from this list!) -- think about which ones apply to more than one of your lenses, and which ones are unusual. ) Promote the Squidoo tag page for those keywords by linking to them in blogs, lenses, webpages and such to improve their PageRank. Don't just wait for them to appear in the Squidoo tag cloud!

One excellent method for promoting your tags is to build a swicki.

I love these new Swickis! This one is new, and will take some time to "train." (Swickis are easy to build, but require a lot of time and effort to customize properly.) This one is for finding Squidoo Tags.