Advanced HubPages SEO Tactics - How to Outrank Another Hub on the Same Subject

This hub was inspired by seeing this hubpages forum thread:

"Can you topple other hubs ?"

Judging by some of the reactions in the forum thread it's likely this hub may be somewhat *controversial* but I will leave the ethics of what you do, up to you to decide, and stick to answering the question.

Short answer: Yes. Just as you can outrank other sites in the Google results over time, given time and a few basic SEO skills you could oust another Hub that Google currently thinks is the most relevant from within hubpages.com and replace it with your own.

Looked at from a slightly different viewpoint, this is actually a very common issue when dealing with large, and particularly dynamic eCommerce type sites, where there is a templated structure, often just pictures with hardly any differentiating text between pages, how do you make the right pages rank for the right things?

The process has similarities to the SEO process you would go through when looking to try and outrank other sites in the charts with your own, only it is often very much easier, because as both the pages are within the same domain, the question of domain authority and trust which are both thought to be major ranking factors these days, is negated, and you are also on an even playing field when it comes to onsite SEO configuration, it's already taken care of for you, and its the same for everyone.

So as always with optimization projects there are two main aspects of the task, On site (or on-page) work, and offsite, ie links, promotion etc,we basically want to match their onpage SEO, and overpower their offsite efforts, and believe it or not this is much easier done than the other way around. So lets look a bit closer.

We are never going to understand all the unique ranking factors in the search engine algorithms, but luckily we dont have to. You can also forget keyword density and just concentrate on writing the best hub on the subject you can, to start with.

When "people" recite Google's "Content is King" Mantra most dont actually understand what that really means with regards to SEO, but it is fairly self explanatory that even if you get the ranking, if your content doesnt engage readers you've wasted all your efforts to get them there, so put as much time as is required in, to get the best page content you can, on the subject.

**Tip: If possible, always build on, update and improve on the topic from what the other/s have written if you can (apart from the obvious updating, the SEO reason to do this will become evident later on)

Then:

1. Ensure the target keywords are in the Page Title, towards the beginning (left hand side)
2. Ensure the target keywords are in the URL, (preferably removing non-important words)
3. Ensure that you have used the keywords liberally, but not overdone throughout text, perfectly natural-reading is good, do not try to work more in for kw density reasons
   
4. Construct Intro paragraph following directions as below:

• Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
  
• Insert primary keywords / phrase and press search
• Note down the top 10-20 variations and export to notepad.
  
• Write a 2-3 line "intro" paragraph working all (or as many as possible) of the top traffic keyword variations into it.
  
• "Introduce your hub" with this paragraph at the top.
  

Lets do a quick example to demonstrate this in action

So using the example above we get

• keyword research
• keyword research tool (and the reverse)
  
• Google keyword research (and the reverse)
• tools for keyword research
• Google keyword research tools (and the reverse)
• free keyword research (and the reverse)

In this instance then it's fairly obvious that with "keyword research" all the main traffic is around the main phrase and a couple of main modifiers, "tools", "Google" and "free"

That makes it nice and easy to write a concise 2 line intro paragraph about it, like:

"Keyword research is now essential to get the best rankings and traffic from Google, who have kindly even made available the search information on their own free keyword research tool - Adwords. We will show you how to use the tools for researching the best keywords for your work."

Note that we've included plural and variations where possible, and that with the chosen phrases we have almost all the variations above covered. After this can come your main content and it can more or less say whatever you want, as long as you have the intro covered, and at that point we're pretty much done with the On page SEO, so go ahead, publish it.

Now the real work starts..

This statement sounds like a cliche and very obvious, but you would be amazed how many (new) people think they can just write something, post it up and it should be at or near the top for their time and effort writing it. ..WRONG.

It is key to gain an understanding your competition's strengths and weaknesses, what they have done well (so you can at least be on par here) and what's not so good so you can outperform them there, and hence get ahead.

Onsite SEO really means something different than On-page, we take Onsite SEO to be more about the structure of the site, internal linking systems and the configuration, tags etc.

With hubpages the basic template is obviously the same for everyone, although the more "connected" you are the better your Hubpages Onsite SEO will be, because more friends = more internal links.

If we go back to the Pie chart above again, you can see that if the Domain Trust / Authority is the same for both of you, as are registration and hosting data, and we can assume that your content (keyword usage) is as good as the incumbent hub then we're really only talking

• page popularity and
• incoming anchor text
  

Both of which are dealt with by obtaining links to your hub. Remember, before you can outrank them in Google, you have to first usurp (userp? :) them as the most relevant page within Hubpages. To see where you are, search in Google using site:

- so site:hubpages.com my keywords will reveal your current positioning within hubpages, example..

The more hubs above your entry, the more work you have in front of you. There is however another way to look at this:

the more hubs above (and below) you, the more relevant linking opportunities.

Internal Linking

1. Go to all the hubs in the search, make notes of all their good tags, and tag your hub with all the same tags.
2. Consider commenting on their hub with a link to yours? ** If as above you have updated and genuinely improved on the subject matter, then a genuine comment with link may get past moderation.
   
3. You could also contact other hubbers above and below you and ask if they would link to your hub from theirs contextually, some may, however the #1 ranking hub probably wont. :)
4. Comment on as many hubs as you can (with or without links to the hub) and make as many friends (followers) as you can, they are all links to your profile page, which inturn links to the hub/s
   
5. If you have targeted a huge keyword you may need to build a central hub on the subject and branch out into the subcategories, like a little mini site within a site as explained here - each linking into the main target hub.

We basically move down the list of possible links getting the quickest easiest wins first, all the way to the most difficult or unlikely.

Look at the backlinks to the hub using Yahoo Site Explorer and the link & linkdomain: query.

So go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and enter

linkdomain:http://hubpages.com/hub/the-hub-I'm-trying-to-outrank - this will show the main domains (one link only from each) - if there's a lot this will show you how many separate domains are linking. if there's not so-o many links then move to:

link:http://hubpages.com/hub/the-hub-I'm-trying-to-outrank - check them all out. If some are on blog post comments, get your links there too.

Any sites that have the link in there that look like information sites, email them (individually) and ask if they'd consider adding your link, always worth a try. Then move on to getting your own new, fresh links, there's still many avenues to explore:

1. Blog posts on your own blogs or sites (or friends)
2. Article or blog post syndication - again work Ok in lower to medium level searches
3. Set up Google Alerts on your keywords, any time someone asks a related question in a forum, join, make a couple of posts elsewhere, then answer their question linking to your hub as the source. (You dont have to make it clear it's yours)
4. If you have the time to devote, White hat Linkwheels take this to the next level, and are proving extremely effective in low to medium level competitive keywords.
5. Guest blogging posts - search for blogs in the niche and email them all asking if they would consider guest posts, many will if the quality of the content is assured.
6. You could consider constructing your own promotional link wheel
   
7. Social Bookmarking - more effective at getting and keeping your links indexed than actually ranking the target hub.

How long this whole process is likely to take depends entirely on how difficult (competitive) the target kw searches are, ie how many people are trying to rank there, and how far ahead they are. An easy way to gauge this in a few seconds is to search the terms using the google Advanced Search Operators:

using allintitle: searches to assess SERP competition

You basically only need to exceed the "tipping point" or relevance threshold to become Google's "most relevant" page on hubpages for the term, and overnight your page will switch into the position the previous ranking hub held.

You may need patience, and put in a lot of work to see no results for a while, but in some ways this is much easier than with your own site, where you are not even sure you can make it rank there. At least with hubpages, we know the site can rank there, so it's only a matter of switching it so your hub ranks instead of another.

More tips & ideas on shuffling inner pages (on wiki) from Bluehat SEO here

• ** Disclaimer - we are not responsible for what you do with this information.
• ** SEO is dangerous and should only be practised by consenting adults.
• ** SERPS may move down as well as up.
• **Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up your SERPs & ROI
  

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