How to Increase Your Hub Score For SEO

SEO is something that all website or blog owners should learn about and one excellent way to do this is with many of the social networks such as Squidoo, StumbleUpon and HubPages. Although traffic from these sites can be great, we really need backlinks that don't have the "no follow" attribute. This means that Google will follow these links, pass on page rank and give your site a boost in the search engines. Getting links is probably one of the most important things you can do in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Although getting backlinks with HubPages does work well, it's important to realize that it is a social site and not simply an article directory such as EzineArticles.com or Buzzle.com. Article directories are amongst the easiest ways to get SEO-friendly backlinks. In order to prevent spammers from abusing the system by creating dozens or even hundreds of accounts, a scoring system has been put in place.

When you first join you'll given the status of Prodigy which means your backlinks will be followed (which is great for SEO). However you will notice that within just a matter of days your status may drop to Average or even Novice. When this happens your links will have the "no follow" attribute (very bad for SEO).

How to Use Hub Pages For Search Engine Optimization?

First of all, I'm no expert in HupPages and I'm just learning myself but from what I gather you need to take part in the community and basically be an active and good quality HubPages user. If you want to increase your score you should start doing the following:-

1. Comment on other pages. Don't leave junk "nice page" comments. Actually read what was written and mention specific points. Say that you didn't know this information before and how useful it was.
2. If you like a particular page make sure you give it a thumbs up and join that person's fan club. Hopefully they will reciprocate which in turn gives your score a boost.
3. Driving traffic to your pages via various sources will help a great deal. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using StumbleUpon. I have a fairly strong StumbleUpon profile which means I can usually get in the region of 80 visits with my thumbs up alone. If you want consitent search engine traffic then you should be getting "anchored backlinks" to your hubs. To do this you need to read up on some basic SEO. The best sites I can recommend are Griz's Make Money Online For Beginners, Court's Internet Marketing School and Vic's Blogger Unleashed. What I will often do is some article marketing with anchored backlinks to the hubs I want to promote. This will help with getting higher in the SERPS and therefore traffic, but it will also help to give your Google PageRank (PR) a boost which will then help your own sites.

4. Keep updating your pages. You can do this by adding videos, amazon and ebay units, add in photos and make changes to the text.
5. Look through the Requests and search for some questions that you can easily answer. This is what I am doing with this particular hub. Obviously I'll have to wait to see if it works. UPDATE: I don't feel that this is too important. Getting traffic from the search engines and creating multiple quality hubs will increase your score better.
6. UPDATE: As of 25 June 08 I haven't created a new hub in quite some time and as a result my overall score as dropped from the mid-ninties to the mid-eighties. It seems that HubPages likes you to create hubs on a regular basis. As long as my hub score stays above a certain amount that is all I care about at the moment.Many HubPage users create hub purely for fun, for me I use HubPages more because I'm an Internet Marketer.

Hopefully this guide will give you an idea of how to increase your score and get backlinks from your pages, giving your sites a boost in SEO. Please also note that your writing should be for the reader and it shouldn't simply be to get people to buy stuff from you or to get backlinks.

I think that's pretty much it. HubPages have implemented this rule to prevent spammers from setting up dozens of accounts. Remember the site is a social site so you need to take part. By doing this you'll increase your score and ensure that all outgoing links are do followed. There is no reason why people into internet marketing cannot use HubPages as long as we all follow the rules.