Link building with Squidoo and HubPages
No link building campaign can be considered complete without the use of Squidoo Lens and HubPages Hubs. While there are many traditional approaches to building backlinks to your site, Squidoo and HubPages are premier social networking sites that offer high-quality contextual link building opportunities.
If you’ve been building backlinks for your site for some time, then you know that typical methods like directory submission, social bookmarking, blog commenting, link sharing, etc. they are not helping you secure the top spot on the search engine you are targeting. While these methods still work to a certain degree and get your SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) up a notch, they are simply not enough to get you top ranking within a competitive niche.
Of many social networking sites these days, Squidoo and HubPages proved to offer the kind of contextual backlinks that Google seems to really like these days. Basically, what you need to do to use these two social sites for your link building purpose is to join the sites for free and post uniquely written articles covering your own site’s topics. Once you publish the articles with Squidoo and HubPages, you will also need to promote those pages for search engine indexing. Within articles, you can use keywords as anchor texts to link back to your own site.
In Squidoo, each page built is called a lens. Once you sign up for a free account and log in to your account, you’ll see your dashboard that you can navigate around to do whatever you want within Squidoo. If you’re building a lens for the first time, you can click the “make a new lens” link in the top left corner of your dashboard. One important piece of information you need to know is that you need to create a lens with at least 3 modules (basically 3 paragraphs under 3 different headings) in order for Squidoo to see your entire lens and allow you to publish it. It is ideal that you write your article in an SEO friendly way by breaking the article into several paragraphs before you start building your lens. Once the article is written, you can simply copy each paragraph into a separate module. You also have the option to add images on your lens which will make the lens look much more attractive.
Link building with Squidoo is easier than HubPages because Squidoo lenses give you dofollow links to start with, while HubPages external links are nofollow to start with. However, there is a way that allows you to make external links become dofollow.
HubPages is pretty much the same as Squidoo in that it also offers you the opportunity to post your article for backlinks. HubPages pages and paragraphs are called hubs and pods compared to Squidoo’s lenses and modules.
While link building with HubPages offers the same great benefit as Squidoo lenses, there’s a bit of extra work involved to get hubs to follow. Each hub account has a personal hub score that must be over 75 for hubs from that hub account to be dofollow. It’s not very difficult to achieve a personal hub score of 75+ and all you have to do is promote your hub to get some traffic and backlinks. The more traffic and backlinks you have, the higher your individual hub score will be. Remember to log into your hub account and edit your hubs from time to time, which will also help.
There are plenty of other social media sites that you can use to build links, but HubPages and Squidoo are two sites that advanced level SEOs use the most. There is no limit to how many lenses or hubs you can create, so you can create page after page and use these 2 sites for an unlimited source of backlinks.