A Guide to Gaining Backlinks

Backlinks are an important part of driving traffic to your Hubs. Good backlinks can help your Hubs show up higher in search engine results, and enjoy more long-term search engine traffic. While high-quality Hubs generally attract backlinks on their own, there are several things you can do to kickstart the process.

One way to garner backlinks is by sharing links to your work on social media and social bookmarking sites and in forums in which you’re already an active participant. Just make sure that you abide by each site’s own rules, are polite, and present yourself as a valid resource. We also encourage you to share a variety of links - not just your own.

For example, you might share a link to your latest Hub on your Facebook wall by inserting the URL into your status update box and providing a short explanation. HubPages offers a Facebook "Like" button on every Hub. We encourage you to add a comment when you Like something on Facebook, as your friends are more likely to check out a Hub that is paired with an interesting comment.

You might also tweet a link to your article (using Twitter). When you tweet about something, it helps to use a hashtag related to your Hub. A hashtag is similar to a tag on HubPages and has a pound sign attached to the beginning of the word. This attaches your tweet to a larger body of tweets also related to that hashtag.

We encourage you to judiciously share Hubs on any other social media site in which you are an active participant. If you want to make a regular habit of doing so, consider installing one of their browser plugins, which make it easy to share any page across the web on that particular network.

Another backlinking alternative is to backlink to HubPages from your own personal blog or website. The best way to do this is to write complementary blog posts or pages. For example, you can write a blog post about a barbecue, and link back to a recipe Hub on a recipe you used at the event.

Additionally, you can embed the HubPages widget into your blog or website. It makes it much easier to present your latest Hubs to an audience of people not on HubPages.com.

You might also backlink to Hubs from other article sites on which you write.

You can furthermore utilize the HubPages Linking Tool. When you provide useful, relevant links to other Hubs, you improve the utility of your articles. The Linking Tool also makes it very easy to interlink your own articles. With regard to interlinking your Hubs, you might especially consider linking to new Hubs from previously written Hubs if the content is related. For example, if you write a Hub on how to carve a whole chicken, you can benefit from linking to it from a previous Hub on the best knives for butchering chicken. In short, it is a good practice to link to new Hubs from previously published ones.

Some backlinks carry greater value than others. Organic backlinks - those that come naturally and gradually over time - carry greater significance than those garnered over a short period of time. Also, links from reputable sites, and not just social media sites, carry greater value. Your long-term goal, then, should be to write content that attracts genuine interest and gets backlinks on its own.

When you publish well-written Hubs that offer truly useful information, as well as helpful photos and other relevant features, you are more likely to get organic backlinks. It therefore helps to focus on quality and originality when writing on HubPages.

In addition to writing high quality Hubs, you can add elements that make your Hub more likely to go viral. One of the coolest ways to do this is to include a quiz. Did you know that the Quiz Capsule can be embedded and shared by readers? If you create a great quiz and include it in your Hub, readers will embed it into their own blogs, webpages, and sites, and that quiz widget will link to your Hub, thereby adding backlinks!

By utilizing this advice, you'll be helping your Hubs earn search engine traffic while also operating well within HubPages standards.