Driving Up Search Engine Rankings with Content Hubs

Driving Up Search Engine Rankings with Content Hubs by John Eberhard

Content hubs, also called “article directories” or “article submission sites,” are web sites with hundreds to thousands of informational articles on them.



Authors can submit their articles to the content hubs. Others can then download these articles and post them on other sites. The benefit for the author is that once the article is posted on a content hub, it contains his company name and web site address. So it provides an inbound link to the author’s web site, meaning a link from another site to his. Plus, if the article is well written it will get downloaded by others and posted on their web sites, providing even more inbound links to the author’s web site.



Inbound Links and Why They’re Important



So what’s the big deal with inbound links? Well, let’s see what Google, the top search engine, says about how important they are to your web site’s ranking on the search engine:



“The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.



“PageRank Explained



“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”



So in order for any web site to get a good page rank on Google, it has to have many sites that link to it. But not just any sites. The sites that link to yours must have a high Google page rank themselves, and if they do, Google assigns more importance and a higher page rank to your web site. So if you have many sites linking to yours, and those sites have a high page rank with Google, then you will have a high page rank also. And that helps to make your site appear higher up when someone searches on the search engine.



How to Get Inbound Links



So now we have established that getting inbound links to your web site is desirable. And we have mentioned that you can get inbound links to your site by submitting articles to content hubs.



Are there any other ways to get inbound links? Yes, there are. There are two other ways that are legitimate:



1. Find other web sites that have high page rank and have something to do with your web site or your industry, write to their webmaster and ask them to put up a link to your site on theirs. Usually it works best to put up a link to their site first before you ask them, which will make them more inclined to link to you.

2. Wait until other sites notice you and decide to put up a link to your web site.



Number one above will take many man-hours, finding the sites and writing to them and putting up a link to their site on yours. Number two means you can’t control it – not a very good option either.



So the best method, in my opinion, is submitting articles to content hubs. There are over 900 hubs on the Internet at this time, some with high Google page ranks. Once you submit an article, it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for your article to appear on the search engines. After 4-6 weeks these articles will tend to drop off search engine results, so it is best to submit a new article at least once a month, better twice a month or once a week.



There is a free online tool that measure how many inbound links there are coming to any given site:

http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/



Go to this page and enter your web site in it and also enter the web sites of some of your competitors, some of the sites that rank highly for the keywords that you want to rank highly for. This tool will give you a good yardstick for seeing how many links you have compared to your competitors. Chances are you’ll see that the competitors who are highly ranked for your desirable keywords have many more inbound links than you do.



The Solution – a Content Hub Submission Campaign



The solution is to get a campaign going of submitting articles to the content hubs. How fast you decide to go will be determined by your available resources, and the size of the gap between you and the competition.



What should you submit? If you publish a hard copy or email newsletter, then you probably have a bunch of articles that you’ve already written related to your business or industry. Here is a sampling of the article categories from a popular content hub:



Advertising

Advice

Affiliate Programs

Autos

Awards

Blogs

Book Reviews

Business

Careers

CGI

Computers

Communication

Copywriting

CSS

Dating

DHTML

Direct Mail

Domain Names

EBooks

ECommerce

Education

Email

Entertainment

Environment

Family

Finance

Fitness

Food

Free

Gambling

Gardening

Government

Health

Hobbies

Home Accessories

Home Business

Home Repair

HTML

Humor

Insurance

Internet

Investment

Javascript

Law

Link Popularity

Malware

Management Marketing Marriage

Metaphysical

MLM

Motivational

Multimedia

Music

Newsletters

Non-Profit

Off-Line Promotion

Online Promotion

Other

Outdoors

Pets

Politics

Press Releases

Product Reviews

Psychology

Publishing

Real Estate

Religion

RSS

Sales

Scams

Science

SE Optimization SE Positioning

SE Tactics

Self Help

Sexuality

Site Security

Social Issues

Spam

Spirituality

Sports

Technology

Traffic Analysis

Travel

Viral Marketing

Web Hosting

Web Design

Webmasters

Weight Loss

Women's Issues

Writing



Chances are you can find a topic or category that will relate to your web site or business.



The important thing is to get a content hub campaign going. It’s one of the best ways to have a real impact and drive up your search engine rankings.




John Eberhard is President of RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a marketing consultant, writer and political analyst living in Los Angeles. He can be reached at http://www.realwebmarketing.net/contact.html



Article Source: Add-Articles.Com