Using Squidoo to Create Quality Backlinks to Your Hubpages Articles | Search Engine Traffic to Hubpages

If you write online, then you know that writing articles is only half the battle for getting your articles found. The second half of the battle comes from promoting your articles.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of information on the internet when it comes to marketing and promoting articles, and often it is difficult to figure out where to spend your time, and what works. The biggest hurdle that authors face is the ever changing nature of the internet, and trying to write online the same way that they write in traditional print media. As any experienced online writer and marketer can tell you, what works in print media will not work online, because readers do not read the same way online as they do newspapers, magazines, and books.

One of the biggest challenges online is that before you can even get someone to look at your article at all, they have to find your article via search engines.

When we look at how people behave when they look for information of any kind online, search engines prove to be a powerful tool, both for the searcher and the author of articles, hubs, and blogs. Knowing how to get your reader to your article via search engines will increase your audience immensely.

Getting traffic to your article is a key strategy towards increasing your influence online. The most interested readers will be those who were already searching for your information on the search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. The concept is that by increasing the value of your article you will move the article link up higher in the search engine, which will in turn get more traffic to your article because more people will find it.

In order for this strategy to work, you will first need to write a search engine optimized article with the keywords or search terms you expect people to use when searching for your topic. The next step is to create quality backlinks to your article from well thought of sites.

What is a backlink? A backlink is a link to your article from another site. Backlinks can be rated in quality by where they come from and how relevant they are to your topic. But in essence a backlink is a link.

The more quality backlinks you have going to your article from high quality relevant sites, the better your site will look to the search engines.

When you first write an article, hub, or blog post, you will not have any backlinks. One way to create backlinks to your main article is to write related articles on other well thought of websites. It is best not to copy and paste the same material over and over again. I also do not recommend article spinning programs because I have yet to see one do a good job at writing a readable article.

What I do recommend is taking parts of your original article, breaking it down and rewriting it, or writing a related topic article on other sites that make sense to backlink to your original article. These should take you less time than your original article because you are already well versed in the topic.

While there are several article sites online, not all of them give you the opportunity to earn extra money from them. If you are going to write additional articles, it makes sense to write them on a high quality site where you can earn additional money. One excellent site is Squidoo.

Squidoo was founded by Seth Godin, a well known marketing guru.  The main function for Squidoo at its founding was to raise money for charity.  Squidoo has continued to raise money for charities over its history, through the work of both the staff and lensmasters (authors).

While Squidoo has some similarities to Hubpages, the site is more lenient on linking to other sites which makes it ideal for writing articles to backlink to your main article on Hubpages or elsewhere.  Squidoo pages often achieve a Google PageRank of 3 or 4, and they rise higher than a standard blog post on the search engines.  This is helpful for driving more search engine traffic to your main article, and adding authority to your page.

In addition, you can make money from the Squidoo page itself depending on traffic, and popularity of the page, as well as whatever money you earn from your main article.

If Squidoo is confusing to you, you can search the Squidoo Answer Deck to find articles that explain how to use Squidoo, use the SquidU forum to ask questions, and also visit the Squidlog website for more in depth answers to becoming a better writer on Squidoo.

Once you get some practice, you will find Squidoo is as easy to write on as Hubpages, and a great place to add backlinks to your primary articles on Hubpages.