This time I'm going to write about a cool little trick that helps you check tag pages faster with Firefox. It's really simple so a lot of people might already know about it. Why would you want to "check" tag pages in the first place? When you enter a tag in your lens, a tag page is created (if it didn't exist already), and it lists all lenses which use that particular tag. While I do enter rare tags for my lenses sometimes ("rare" meaning there are no other lenses with same tags, so your lens will be the only one on the tag page) I usually try to enter more "popular" tags as well. The reason is that a new tag page will not even be indexed by Google yet, and won't have any PageRank assigned. Most popular tag pages - such as "movies" or "food" - have hundreds of lenses linking to them, and as a result, have higher PageRank - and it is more beneficial for your lens to be linked from such important pages (if they match the topic of your lens, of course).
You probably already know that Squidoo tag pages look like this:
http://www.squidoo.com/tags/tag1+tag2+tag3
What you do is you go to a tag page - doesn't matter which one - and bookmark it with Firefox by pressing CTRL+D. Then you click "Bookmarks", right-click on the tag page you just bookmarked, and choose "Properties". You edit the Location field so it looks exactly like this:
http://www.squidoo.com/tags/%s
And you add a short keyword that you will be using to access the tag page - such as tag (yes... very creative). Here's how it should look:
Now you will be able to quickly access and check the Squidoo tag pages by typing in "tag movies" or "tag food" and such into your Firefox adress bar. This way you will see if any other lenses are linking to the same tag page, and if it's popular and worth adding to the list of tags on your lens. As for checking PageRank of that page, you could install Firefox add-ons such as Google Toolbar or something more powerful like SEO for Firefox. Remember that choosing the right tags is an important part of building a good lens!
Of course, this feature of Firefox can be used for other things as well ("Keyword" field replaces the URL and "%s" replaces the user input after it). Checking Squidoo tags is just one of the many possible applications.
8 comments:
That's a neat trick, Andrew - I didn't know you could do that with Bookmarks in Firefox. I guess you could use the same technique to jump to any lens or a lens workshop.
Captain Squid recently wrote about the link flow to tag pages, and it got me thinking about how to to choose good tags... those with only one lens are perhaps not so useful after all.
Wow - that is a very interesting post from Captain Squid. The picture explains it all very well.
I was thinking myself for a while that adding long keywords (that no other lens uses) to your tags might not be so useful after all. So I've been going over them and trying to pick more of the popular ones.
I'm terrible at tracking my stats so I'm not sure yet if there are noticeable positive results, but at the very least I'm getting more traffic from Squidoo (and more ratings as a result) which is always a good thing.
Andrew,
Excellent trick my friend. Would you mind if I republished and excerpt of your trick as part of my tagging series? (With proper attributions of course :) ).
I love finding squidooers who like to think outside of the box :).
I would love that. Thanks! :)
I'm having trouble getting this to work. I keep getting an error "Bad Request - Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand."
I am using Firefox 2...
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Ok, so I don't read properly...
I have to type "tag xxxx" not click on the link...
It works of course :)
Very cool.
This was great information. Followed the steps and once I realized NOT to put the quotes around tag movie, just type it into the browser I was good to go. I've tweaked my top lens tonight.
I have one question: Where do you suggest I go to optimize my tags. So much information out there I am be-fused :-) Learning new things everyday though!
clouda9 - checking what keywords people use to find your lens and adding them as tags might be a good start.
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