Link Building With Social Media Sites Like Squidoo and HubPages

A link building campaign can not be considered as complete without the effective use of Squidoo and HubPages. While it is perfectly acceptable to utilize other traditional methods of building backlinks, these two social media sites offer such valuable link building opportunity that you cannot ignore them.

If you have been working on building backlinks to your site for a while, then you know that usual techniques like directory submissions, social bookmarking, blog commenting, link exchanges, etc. may not help you securing the top search engine position you are expecting. While these techniques still work to some extent and do get your SERP (search engine result pages) ranking improved, they are just not enough anymore for higher ranking if you have a competitive niche.

Out of many social media sites these days, Squidoo and HubPages proved to offer the kind of contextual backlinks that Google seem to like a lot these days. Basically what you do to use these two social sites for your link building purpose is to join the sites for free and publish uniquely written articles covering the topics of your own site. Once you publish the articles with Squidoo and HubPages, you then need to promote those pages as well for search engine indexing. Within the articles, you can use the keywords as anchor texts to link back to your own site.

On Squidoo, each page built is called a lens. Once you sign up for a free account and login to your account, you will see your dashboard which you can navigate through to do what ever you want to do within Squidoo. If you are to build a lens for the first time, then you can just click on the link where it says "make a new lens" on the top left corner of your dashboard. One important piece information you need to know is that, you need to build a lens with at least 3 modules (basically 3 paragraphs under 3 different headers) for Squidoo to view your lens as complete and allow you to publish it. It is ideal that you write your article in an SEO friendly fashion dividing the article by multiple paragraphs before you start building your lens. Once the article is written, you can just copy each paragraph under one separate module. You also have the option to add images on your lens which will make the lens look lot more attractive.

Link building with Squidoo is easier than HubPages because Squidoo lenses offer you dofollow links to begin with where HubPages external links are nofollow to begin with. There is a way which allows you to get the external links to turn to dofollow however.

HubPages is somewhat similar like Squidoo since it also offers the opportunity to publish your own article for backlinks. Pages and paragraphs on HubPages are known as hubs and capsules compared to lenses and modules of Squidoo.

While link building with HubPages offers similar great benefit like Squidoo lenses, there is a bit of extra work needed to make the hubs turn dofollow. Each hub account has a personal hub score that shows on the right sidebar which needs to be 75+ for all the hubs under a specific hub account to be dofollow. It is not very hard to gain 75+ personal hub score and all you need to do is to market your hub to get a little traffic and some backlinks. More traffic and backlinks you have, higher individual hub score you get. Remember to login to your hub account and make minor edit to your hubs once in a while which will also help keeping your hub score up.

There are lots of other social media sites that you can utilize for link building purposes but HubPages and Squidoo are two sites that are being used most by advanced level SEO professionals these days. There is no limit as to how many lenses or hubs you can build so you can just keep building pages after pages on these 2 sites for unlimited backlinks.

Summary: Traditional methods of link building may not be enough for securing higher search engine rankings, especially if you have a competitive niche. You need to build backlinks using some advanced methods that not many other average link builders are tanking advantage of.