Writing Useful Hubs and Reworking Existing Hubs For SEO

We get rewarded for keeping old hubs up to date with modifications.

I see ranking and traffic improve when I maintain old articles and keep them up to date. Google likes fresh content.

I originally wrote this as a previous progress report. And updated this Hub with new information.

Some time ago I became busy with life off Cyberspace. You know, the thing they call “real life” that existed before the Internet. I had no time to write new hubs or be part of the HP community in the forums for a while. Nevertheless, I continued to get decent traffic and my Hubber Score remained in the 90’s.

What made this happen and what can we learn from this?

Well, there was one thing I did with HubPages during my busy time. I had made a number of changes to improve some existing hubs. I decided to do that as a last resort since I had no time to write new ones.

I have a certain amount of obsessiveness about my old Hubs. I sometimes spend more time reviewing my existing Hubs than I do with writing new ones. If I see that traffic is dropping off on a particular Hub, I like to research it to find out why.

I look over my Google Analytics reports as well as the stats that HubPages provides under the "stats" tab on each Hub. I usually discover a problem with that research, and I learn what I need to do to fix it.

My efforts show me that keeping old hubs up to date with modifications brings in new traffic. Google sends more traffic because of the new and fresh content.

An additional enhancement to non-working Hubs can be done by using the adwords keyword tool to find better keyword phrases that can be used. This is not only something that should be done with new Hubs, but later with older Hubs as well. It works better to do it again after a Hub had a chance to incubate so you can see what works and what doesn't.

Reviewing my stats on some hubs I had noticed that some were getting more traffic from Google than from HubPages. Google traffic is better for making a little money from your writing because they are likely to click ads. Hubbers know not to do that since it is against policy to click your own ads. We never know if our affiliate code might just be in the page we are looking at.

Selecting a few Hubs that were getting little traffic from Google, I reworked them and made improvements. I focused on keeping the readers attention by staying close to the point of each Hub, which is the reason why they came to read them to begin with.

When Google sees that people stick around to read the entire thing, they know it must be worthwhile. So they send more traffic over a period of time. My efforts paid off and had proven my point.

I pay close attention to the Hubs at the bottom, getting little traffic, and those at the top, getting the most traffic.

I believe that success comes from taking a good thing and improving on it. Keep working at it with existing Hubs. Obsessiveness pays off.

I know, I can hear you saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Even though I do agree with you, I have to say that there is a difference between fixing something and improving upon it. So I improved my good Hubs simply by reading them and making some adjustments to the way I was saying things. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

As for the bad ones, I had to give them even more TLC. But it’s worth the time and effort.

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Each time you re-read your own work, you may realize you said something is a way that was hard to understand. Or the way you explained something could be interpreted differently than you thought or meant when you first wrote it.

You may catch that when you proof-read it. Or you may miss it on one proof-read and catch it another time you re-read your article. So reviewing your work several times helps more than you can imagine.

If you never tried it, if you were just too lazy and just wanted to be done with it already, then do yourself a favor and give it a try. After all, you want to make money with your writing, don’t you?

When I was writing my self-help book “What Was I Thinking? A Review Of Relationships” that was published in December 2009, I couldn’t stop changing it. Every time I proofread it I made changes.

Once I even moved an entire chapter to a different location. Another time I even pulled out an entire section that I felt was not working for the book. In order to create quality writing, we need to be willing to make changes when we see we can improve something. And we need to allow ourselves to find the weak spots that can be improved.

The beauty of HubPages is that we can do this even after we have published a hub. I can’t do that anymore with my published book. But I am able to rework and improve my hubs.

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When you’re updating your Hubs, you may want to consider the alternative of doing it on a “live Hub” or unpublishing it first.

People will see your text as you are editing online. This is because HubPages does an "auto save" while you are working. That makes your intermediate changes visible for anyone who clicks to your Hub while you are editing.

An alternative is to unpublish your Hub while you are updating it. But I highly recommend against this! I’ll tell you why. If Google happens to crawl your Hub just at that moment when it’s unpublished, it will get removed from the search. And it will take time to build up its ranking again.

Therefore I recommend not to unpublish. But how do you avoid the real-time access to your updating process? Here’s what I do. I copy the text from an entire text capsule that I want to work on, and paste it into MS Word. You can use whatever text editor you have.

So the trick is to work on it off line. Get all the changes done. Then copy and paste the updated block of text back into the text capsule. This will avoid letting your readers see weird concoctions of unfinished sentences. And you won’t lose your ranking or placement in Google search either. For that matter, the new and fresh content should end up giving your ranking a boost.

So concentrate on writing worthwhile articles for your hubs that will continue to generate more traffic from search engines. As your readership grows and Google “monitors” their time spent in your hubs, the good ones will appear more often for searches people do on that specific topic.

That process may very well be a self-running system that generates money for you even if you can’t remain active in the HP community at times when life gets in the way.

I don’t suggest you write a bunch of articles and then expect to go away forever and just receive checks. That’s not going to happen. But if life brings other things you need to put your attention to, you can spare the time away from your writing for a short duration. The key is that you want to leave behind a number of worthwhile hubs. What’s worthwhile? If you check out what buttons your readers are clicking under each hub... “Useful, Funny, Awesome and Beautiful,” you’ll soon see the common denominator of all of these is that they are all “worthwhile.”

Copyright © 2012 Glenn Stok

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