I am fairly new to HubPages. I have only been a member for about three months. I work full-time so I’m lucky to get one hub in a week. Sometimes I get on a roll and publish a couple at a time. My hub total currently sits at seventeen. This will be the eighteenth. While checking my statistics in HubPages the last week or so, I noticed a couple of my hubs, Internet Reading Pros and Cons: How the Internet is Changing My Reading Habits and Roadside Prairies: Flowers or Weeds have both been increasing in traffic - more than twice as much as usual and growing every day. So I went to Google and conducted a search and was totally shocked to see both of these articles on the first page and even the first entry. The internet article was the first of 1,210,000 entries! The prairie flower article was only the first of 42,000 but I was still impressed. I got the same results on Yahoo Search. I just had to share my good news with all my fellow hubbers.

I am somewhat of a perfectionist and I put a good deal of planning and effort into each hub. I have also been studying SEO and how to get more traffic to my site. I recently signed up for Google Analytics which is proving to be very interesting already, even with only two days of information. I am hoping to generate more traffic with the insight I gain from their statistics. I have also been reading that you do not need to submit your url to the search engines because they crawl the internet every few weeks or months. They start at one website and follow every link they come across. Once the page is indexed they will follow every link from that page until there are no more to follow. But I figured it couldn’t hurt and may get me noticed sooner so I submitted my HubPages url to these search engines:

Google – the most popular
Yahoo Search – the second largest (Altavista and Alltheweb are both powered by Yahoo so you get three for the time of one submission)
Bing – the new kid on the block - used to be Windows Live Search or MSN Search
cuil – pronounced like ’cool’ – claims to be the world’s largest. When I looked it claimed to have searched 124,426,951,803 web pages.
Alexa –a subsidiary of Amazon

You can do this for free so do not pay someone to submit to “hundreds or thousands” of search engines. There really are not that many major search engines.

A more important SEO tip is you should submit your url to link directories. I am still working on this. I have a hard time trying to figure out which category I should use for my HubPages profile url. It doesn’t seem to fit in any of the categories. If anyone has any suggestions, please help me out.

Search engines apparently love forums so my goal is to find some that interest me, make some comments and add my link for HubPages.

I have added my link to Facebook, a Google group I belong to, and my profile in a game site I play on once in a while. I went back to all my hubs and added some links to some of my other articles and I believe it is helping increase traffic. I have a blog where I am promoting my HubPages articles with a nifty little widget HubPages provides that lists my latest hubs. I also use one of their banners at the bottom of my page. Even though my blog traffic is slow yet, it is steadily increasing and sending traffic to my hubs. You may also want to add your RSS link to a few RSS directories. I have added mine to three so far and they are beginning to send traffic my way. The three I have submitted to are: feedage.com, feedest.com, and RSS-Mountain.com. So I guess my efforts at creating more traffic are starting to work. But this will be an ongoing project.

Now I need to buckle down and keep on writing….and my goal is to come up with a topic that hits the top of Google and Yahoo that will pull in hundreds or thousands of views a day!