Squidoo is probably better known than Hubpages - but for my money - Hubpages is the better bet for not only developing back links but also getting qualified traffic, and the potential to develop your hubpage home page with a good PR, a number of the better hubs have PR4 on their home page now. Oh and you can add as many links as you like on your home page!

What I like about hubpags includes:

• easy to add videos and pictures to break up the text: and get a bit of traffic from image searches;
• simple to use, no HTML is allowed and the capsules are more limited than squidoo’s but this makes it quick and easy to create an hub;
• use news feeds and/or eBay capsules for automatic updates for your hubs;
• limit to only 2 “self-serving” links per a hub keeps the spam level relatively low.

There are a couple of quirks with Hub Page that those who want to use hubpages for internet marketing purposes should know.

Hubpages Forum’s Ambiance
A number of the active community on the forums are primarily writers rather than online business people. There is a strong feeling that writing is important. Commercial hubs are tolerated - but anyone naively coming to the forums and asking what the community thinks of their very first hub: “How to Make Money Fast Online” will get short shrift - and probably get their hub flagged as inappropriate. Yes that’s right a lot of hubs which are flagged are done by community, so be respectful!

Hubscore Matters

Every hubber has an overall hubscore, and every hub as an individual hubscore. The two are somewhat related and both reflect traffic, particularly from outside hubpages, length of hub, and, in the case of the hubber’s hubscore, in activity such as rating other hubs, commenting and forum posting. And unless your hubscore is 75 your hub’s links will be tagged as “no follow” - a hub every month or so should see you easily maintain that score. This is the single most important feature of hubpages, in my opinion, because it keeps the spammers out.

Hubpages has never suffered from the fall from favour that squidoo has had. Most hubs are indexed within a few hours.

Hubpages appears to have a strong nternal linking strategy - with each home page have links to latest, hot and best hubs. Certain tags are routinely featured on the front page: make sure you include any that are relevant in your hubs: entertainment, how to, money, business, family are commonly featured. Tags are keywords and you should add a good number to your hub to improve your internal backlinks

Elisabeth Sowerbutts is an active hubpages author and wrote Hubpages and Internet Marketing for those who want to use Hubpages for internet marketing to best effect.

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Well, do you need links? If that sounds like the stupid question of the day, it is! Of course we need links else our sites will not feature well in the SERPs. I started the ball rolling in my last post Web Directory, where you can create your own to provide your sites with extra one way links.

So what, in the present climate of Google unrest, is another good way to get strong backlinks?

Create your own PLIGG site!

Ok, I see some head scratching happening here, so I’d better explain what a pligg site is for those of you who don’t know. A pligg site is essentially a social bookmarking site where you can submit your latest blog post and get a link back to your blog from it. Digg and BloggingZoom are examples of a pligg site. If you have your own hosting account, there is nothing stopping you creating your own pligg site. All you need is a suitable domain (an aged one is best, preferably with some PR), the free software from pligg.com and a little work and Bob’s your uncle! Instant pligg site!

I posted a more detailed explanation over here: Social Links, if you want to know more of the nuts and bolts of pligg sites.

I have personally created my own and it lives here The Fast BookMarker.

Check it out for yourself and see how easy it is to register and submit a blog post of your own. Once you get the feel for it, you can make friends and vote for other posts. Other members will then vote for yours and once you get a mere 5 votes, you get onto page one where your blog will get a PR2 backlink and some good SERPs authority for your keywords which you should put at least once in your summary description - which for maximum benefit should be original and not cut/pasted from your blog, or your link will not be counted by Google.

How easy is that? A simple submission will promote your blog.

If you think that’s good, then when you create and start using your own pligg site, you can give as many of your own blog posts a boost as you wish!

So what are you waiting for? Have a look at my site for ideas and then get on and make your own!

Terry Didcott
Author of Blogging Web 2.0

Filed under: Internet Marketing | 11 Comments »