Traffic and Page Rank from HubPages
If you are already using HubPages to make sales (affiliate or your own products), pre-sell traffic to offers or increase your incoming links, this often missed technique is a two minute trick you need to know.
One marketer in my circle has said that she has used this to make fast money with affiliate products, but I couldn’t promise you the same. Finding that fast opportunity may be hit or miss, but profiting in the long term doesn’t need to be, if you do this right. This technique, at any rate, is more effective for the long term.
I’m not about to teach you how to create Hub Pages or Squidoo Lens’ - just one facet of the process that will take your pages on either site and get you more bang for your buck (whether that’s earning money, clicks, search engine positioning, or all three).
I started playing around with this and after creating a quick Squidoo lens for a new niche, I found that within just a few days I was receiving traffic to a test page from that lens as well as earning money through a low level affiliate payout program.
I set out on a mission to discover how and why it worked so fast that very day…
Knowing HubPages had similar features to Squidoo it didn’t take much to test this process there as well. However since I started experimenting with this, Squidoo/Google have halted PR on tag pages…more later, if this changes.
Let me just show you what’s going on with HubPages, traffic and PR. Be sure to read each caption under the images to get the point…
Your Hub Page can have PR, (the one above has a PR2), and an outgoing link - to your own website - that passes PR!
Tag pages (example shown above) have PR, and pass PR! Tag Pages are important to know about...
A HubPages' profile page can have PR as well as its own traffic source. Profile pages also pass PR!
What You Need to Know and Do
- When creating your profile be sure to add links to your actual website.
- When creating your hub pages be sure to include your website url.
- Choose your tags wisely.
The Strategy of Tagging on HubPages
To receive traffic in the shortest period of time to your hub page (and to maximize the potential for search engine ranking) you want to tag your hub page with the highest ranked tags.
This means that you will need to know your market well and spend 5 minutes or so surfing tag pages.
Let me give you some examples why this may be important:
Here is the tag page for photography (opens in a new window)- http://hubpages.com/tag/photography/hot (PR3 at time of writing)
Obviously that was a good choice for a tag on digital camera content.
There are better choices, but there are also worse, and if you’re not careful in your selection you could be missing out!
Staying with the camera theme, look at these related tag pages and their PR:
- http://hubpages.com/tag/digital+camera/hot (PR0)
- http://hubpages.com/tag/digitalcamera/hot (PR0)
- http://hubpages.com/tag/digital+cameras/hot (PR0)
- http://hubpages.com/tag/canon/hot (PR2)
- http://hubpages.com/tag/pictures/hot (PR4)
- http://hubpages.com/tag/photos/hot (PR4)
- http://hubpages.com/tag/technology/hot (PR5)
You might have easily selected the first four if you hadn’t done some investigative research first. And you would have missed out on the tagging potential of HubPages.
Whenever you build a hub page, surf through some of the related tag pages and choose the best ones for the biggest bang to your hub page and subsequently, your website.
But wait!
There is more to tags on Hub Page that you need to know.
Tag pages only display 10 hubs per page.
Some tag pages have multiple pages.
None (that I have seen) pass rank to subsequent pages (page 2, page 3, etc. results).
For example, a tag page and the ‘page 2′ for that tag…
http://hubpages.com/tag/technology/hot (PR5)
http://hubpages.com/tag/technology/hot?page=2 (PR0)
Over 320 tag pages exist for technology.
None, but the first, are passing PR. And like Google listings, very seldom does anyone click on any listing past page 2 of the results anyway.
Let’s be upfront here. You’re not building hubpages so that you can be the new Hub Super Star. You do want to build a hub that:
- contains your keywords,
- links back to your money site,
- passes some page rank, and/or
- builds your brand.
You don’t want to spend time fighting, clawing, promoting and tweaking a HubPage to become #1 for the technology tag.
It might be nice for bragging rights, but it is not worth the fight or time.
So…
Even though you may have minimal chance at being on the first page of a tag page, if the tag PR is good (has a PR5 or higher) I suggest you to do it anyway.
Here’s why.
Although page 2 results for ‘technology’ have a PR0.
And sorting (see the image below) by ‘Best’ shows a PR0.
Look for this sorting feature and click it to uncover easy PR gold.
The sort ‘Latest’ has a PR3! (http://hubpages.com/tag/technology/latest)
So even though you may never be #1 in technology, your hub page will still be connected to that tag and for a time you will be receiving a PR3 link to your hub page…which in turn links to your profile and your money site.
Okay, got that?
Don’t go yet…there’s more!
If the best you can hope for is a ‘Latest’ listing for a high PR tag page on HubPages, I urge you to tell the world, search engines included, by quickly pinging that page’s RSS feed. (A ping is a notification to the update services that a page has changed.)
How you ping is up to you. I use a small desktop software application and ping multiple aggregators at once. If you don’t have software or any experience pinging, just head over to pingomatic.com, enter the rss url and call it a day. 25 update services are notified through Ping-O-Matic and yes, it’s free.
Tell 25 updating services, including Google, that you have a new hub page!
Now go get busy building better HubPages and tag them intelligently for extra traffic, branding and link love!
- Web 2.0 HubPages and Squidoo Tag Pag Finder -
If you don’t want to perform the above research, but you do want to target the busiest tag pages on HubPages and Squidoo, you might like this software. Click here or watch the video below to see how it works.
