SEO for Squidoo and HubPages

By C Doug Mah

Squidoo and HubPages are excellent ways to use social marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy, either for your own webpage or blog or for affiliate sites that you are promoting. But in order for your Squidoo lenses and HubPages hubs to be effective, you have to drive traffic to these sites. And here you have two main options: pay per click advertising, like Google AdWords, or organic search engine optimization or SEO. This article will discuss the basics of SEO as it applies to your efforts on Squidoo and HubPages

Keywords
No discussion about SEO can even start until you have a clear idea on the keywords that are relevant to you and for which you want to rank for. Keywords are what SEO is all about as keywords are what drive the searches.

Selecting keywords to optimize for is an iterative process. Start with your topic or niche idea and then use keyword research tools to hone in on keyword phrases that you would like to rank for. The best free tools out there are the Google Keyword Tool and Wordtracker’s Free Keyword tool that you can Google.

Start with your starter keyword phrase and then drill down to longer keyword phrases, called longtail keywords that are not so competitive. You don’t want to go after a keyword phrase, at least at the start, that has 1 million searches a month. You are more likely to be able to rank well with longtail keyword phrases with 10,000 or less searches per month.

URL or Web Address
When you start writing your Squidoo lens or HubPage hub, you are asked what you want your lens URL to be. For Squidoo, your lens URL will have the form of http://www.squidoo.com/YourURL. For HubPages, your hub URL will have the form of http://www.hubpages.com/hub/YourURL. Make sure that your keyword phrase is in the URL you create. And if your URL is long, try to have your keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the URL as possible.

Lens or Hub Title
Choose a title for your Squidoo lens or HubPage hub that contains your target keyword phrase. Again, the closer to the beginning of the title, the better. Also, try to keep your title to less than 65 characters so that Google doesn’t truncate your title and add ellipses at the end. This will effect your click through rate when your article shows up in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Description
In HubPages, you can provide a description of your hub in the Summary section. When your hub is picked up by Google, this description will show up in the SERP. Make sure that your keyword phrase is included in this description. Also, make sure what is in the description is enticing to the potential reader as this will get you the click.

In Squidoo, the introduction module which contains your lens description serves the same purpose.

Try to keep the description to 150 characters or less and provide 2 – 3 sentences with your enticing hook.

Tags
Google doesn’t use these for indexing purposes but Yahoo and MSN do. HubPages doesn’t even show it to the bots that index your pages so it has no effect on SEO. These keyword tags are more for helping people find content when they do an actual search on Squidoo or HubPages rather than using one of the main search engines. Accordingly, if these keywords are the results of painstaking research that you don’t want your competition to find out about, don’t put your “money keywords” here but keep them generic. Use 6 – 8 tags at the most.

Content
For both Squidoo and HubPages, make sure your content provides value. Your keyword phrases should show up in the beginning and at the end of the lens or hub and used appropriately throughout. Don’t pack your content with your keyword phrases but use them naturally. You don’t want your content to be too perfect for SEO. Try to focus on one keyword phrase for your lens or hub.

Conclusion
There you have it for the basics of SEO for Squidoo lenses and HubPage hubs. I haven’t dealt with linking structure at all but that depends upon how you are using your Squidoo lenses and HubPage Hubs in your marketing strategy. And that is a topic for another day.

If your goal is to use Squidoo or HubPages to help your business online, a great training ground is Renegade University. Mike Klingler's FREE membership site offers step-by-step, click-by-click, video tutorials on article marketing for network marketing.

About C Doug Mah

Doug is part of the “Super Guides” team with Renegade University and Renegade Professional, guiding and coaching in the area of internet attraction marketing.

Doug’s background is in finance and accounting in the corporate world.In the past 13 years, as a senior finance executive, he has helped grow and position 3 high-tech companies for acquisition.Having gone through the cycle of finding a new job, building a company, selling a company, integratng the company with the new company, and back to finding a job, and seeing what is happening in corporate America with the recent financial crisis and its fallout, Doug sees that future does not lie in corporate America.Developing your own business, You Inc., is the way to build your own economy of the future and secure you and your family financially.

For more tips and training on Squidoo and HubPages see Doug at http://RenegadeTrainerOnline.com/blog

Comments

[Pat Campbell]

This keyword use overview provides great insight to how to place keywords effectively. Tips for usinging keywords in titles, URL and throughout content are simple, yet accomplish being found by the search engines which, is the point.

Thanks,