How to use Search Engines keywords to increase traffic on Hubpages

If you are not using Hubpages stats data to optimize your articles, well, you might be missing some traffic if not loads of traffic. Driving traffic using article optimization strategies might not be the primary goal for being a writer on Hubpages but seeing your articles tap on search engines traffic won’t hurt either.

After spending some time on Hubpages, you will realize that Hubpages is not just another publishing website to help writers put their content on the web. It is actually a robust publishing platform optimized to maximize writers’ gains for their effort in creating content.

Hubpages is one of the most friendly optimized publishing websites, not because it commands some Google love but because a considerable amount of effort has be used to build content publishing tools.

From design tools, stats tools, social media tools, navigation, layout etc. you will find ease of use with most of these tools.

Hubpages tools such as “Statistics”, “Traffic Sources”, “Title Tuner” and “Stats” on article performance on search engines can be used to optimize traffic on Hubpages. For the purpose of this article, I will use Stats on “Search Term Data” of one of my articles to demonstrate how you can use search engines stats on search term data to increase traffic on Hubpages.

Hubpages article stats can provide search engines performance data on a specific article. This data is corrected over a period of time so, for newly published articles and especially those not yet “Featured” there may be few or no data. To access article’s stats on Hubpages, click the Stats link located at the top of every article.

Using Hubpages article stats you will be able to know whether your article is searchable on search engines (Featured) or not, when was the last time search engines crawled on your article, which terms are used to search your article.

You can also get details of how much traffic is your article garnering daily, weekly, monthly or in total and from which sources. Other details include article word count, view duration, incoming links and whether the article has any winning bids on eBay.

Note: Google Analytics can also provide such details and much more, plus you will have more accurate data and better data visualization. If you have not yet setup Google Analytics account, you might be missing on useful information about your hubs’ traffic and trends.

Among the details provided on Hubpages article stats are search terms found on the “Search” tab. From here, you will get to know words that are used in searches but are not in your title.

These search words are important because they form probable keywords for your article. It means that if you can include these words in your article title, you may form an exact or close keywords match used by searchers.

Be careful though as not every word listed as search term makes sense when used in the title, some actually don’t. To learn how you can use search engines search terms on article stats to increase traffic on Hubpages, let us take an example using one of my articles.

Three months after publishing this article, it could only make a trickle of daily views (less than 20 views per day), safe for the few days after publishing which is normal as hubs tend to get significant traffic from other hubbers just after publishing.

After four or five months of publishing an article, you can be able to tell from Hubpages article stats of which terms are being used in searches for the article. Take note of any word that is appearing often in searches but is not in your title. The word has to make sense when used with your title as you don’t want to use a word that will change the title meaning.

From the above image, you will notice that searchers are using the word “demand” often when searching for this article. This word was not in the article title, the article was initially titled: Top 10 Most Popular And Preferred Programming Languages. Changing the article title to: Top 10 Most Popular Programming Languages In Demand will not change the title meaning. Immediately after changing the article title its views increased sharply, stabilized and started increasing steadily thereafter.

Notice that searchers are also using the word “ten” instead of the “10” used in the title. Although search engines should interpret these two terms in relation, an author can compare the frequency of appearance and decide on which term to use in the title.

For example, from the search term data image above the term “10” appears more often than “ten” so I decided not to include the term "ten" in the article title but include it in the article summary instead.

The choice of article domain also matters when it comes to traffic. You will notice that there are articles which can attract traffic from a wider audience while others are limited to specific readers. Although the article used here as an example is listed among the top on SERPs, it might not return much hits due to its limited domain as many searchers might not be interested in programming topics.

Making little tweaks on your article titles can make all the difference in traffic and luckily Hubpages has several tools to help you on that including the “Title Tuner.” It may take time to analyze searchers' keywords and how they will impact on your article title, summary or body but it pays in the long run. The trick is to continually monitor your article stats to note searchers’ trends which can improve your articles performance on traffic.