With so much emphasis being placed on links by the search engines, particularly Google, the concept of putting all of your links on one easy-to-manage links page or asking for all links back from link partners to land on your home page may seem attractive but may be counter productive in the context of a decent linking and hub page strategy.

Simply put, hub pages are a key on-site optimisation technique designed to help the search engines and users alike easily navigate and identify relevant content and links, helping them to more clearly understand the theme of your site. They are particularly important for larger sites or sites with multiple themes. A hub page is like any other page on your site except that both internal links (your navigation) and external links (link partners) are focused on achieving stronger rankings for this page than for some of the other surrounding pages. Think of it as the home page for that theme on your site if you will.

The strong ranking and clear theming of a hub page can then be conveyed to other relevant pages on your site via your internal navigation structure. In many cases, the pages to which you are conveying the ranking may be fluid – a changing product catalogue for example. Having a solid stable hub page that is ranked for some of the “big terms” for the subject at hand allows you to very quickly help with the ranking of new product pages.

For some larger sites these may be category or perhaps sub category pages. Look at any of the established price comparison sites and you will see pages that rank in the search engines for a particular theme and which link to other related pages for that theme. You will also note that many of these pages contain some of the strongest content for the subject area in question. For example a section on photography may have a hub page with detailed information on photography and links to the relevant sub category pages covering each area of photography. For a less commercial example, Wikipedia makes extremely good use of hub pages with many other pages hanging off specific themed hub pages, the hub pages enjoying strong rankings for the broader search terms.

Creating a Hub Page
Hub pages should contain some of your best content for this theme. On a site which has lots of individual pages or articles about holidays, for example, hub pages can be created for each major destination country or region. This will be a lead page which will give a fairly detailed introduction as to what the country or region has to offer the holidaymaker and will then have both contextual links in the content but more importantly a set of links to the other most relevant pages on your site for each specific destination.

To make the most of hub pages and to build ranking for such pages there are certain things you should do. The first is, in addition to ensuring that the SEO for the hub page itself is spot on for your target keywords, you should also make sure that the detailed or sub category pages you’re linking to are equally SEO friendly. On each of the pages, make sure the META description is spot on, heading tags are used, ALT text and all the usual on-page SEO elements are in place. Then check out the keyword density of each page, using tools such as SEO Quake and make sure the content is keyword rich and totally relevant. It’s worth working on this content, keeping updated where appropriate and including contextual links within it too. Ideally each of the links will contain keywords in the anchor text and will link to relevant and deep content within the site. For new hub pages, it’s also worth linking to pages on your site that already have a search engine ranking.

Linking for a Hub Page
Hub pages and “deep linking” go hand in hand. Deep linking is the recommended approach whereby you ask your link partners to link to the most relevant page on your site using anchor text in their links that supports the terms for which you wish those pages to rank. A decent set of links to the hub page from your partners and you should see some solid, sustainable rankings over time. Depending on the theme of your site, you may also link back to any reciprocal link partners directly from the hub page. If the partners are obviously closely thematically matched this will be a good thing from a search engine perspective. If the nature of your business means that you tend to link to complimentary partners in a range of useful and relevant but perhaps less directly connected themes (theming is highly complex), you may decide that it is better to create a specific content page from which to return links to partners for this subject area and just have a single link to this new page from the hub page – almost like a mini links page but of course not named as such and with rich content as well as links to partners included on it.

You should also ensure that your internal linking and navigation structure supports your hub page. A link to each hub page should ideally appear on your standard navigation menu and most definitely from your home page. Again, think of the price comparison sites with a list of categories on their home pages. Each detail page should also link back to the hub page. The hub page should also be linked to from any other closely related hub page and from your site map. All of your internal links should use the main search term for which the hub page is to be optimised as the anchor text.

Sequence of Events
Some people prefer to create the hub pages first. Others argue that working on the individual pages first and increasing the link equity and keyword density on each of them before the hub pages are created is a better approach. Ultimately, both should have the same effect: a solid hub page ranked for its target terms and ready to confer ranking to other relevant pages as needed.

Hub Pages and Monetisation
As you will no doubt have gathered from the above, the hub page is likely to be fairly busy with rich content and lots of relevant contextual links. As such, there is likely to be limited space for monetisation. Since all linked pages are relevant to the theme and the terms for which the hub page is designed tend to be broad-ish, you are taking control of traffic for that term and presenting the user with a clearly organised set of links to other pages on your site wherein the most relevant page for their specific requirement (yet to be determined based upon the fact that they entered the broader search term) should be catered for. As an example, a hub page could be optimised for “holidays to Germany” rather than attempting to optimise a monetising page on holidays to Berlin for “Holidays to Germany” as well as “Holidays to Berlin” which will only serve to dilute the optimisation for the Berlin page. The hub page should thus capture “holidays to Germany” traffic with the user clicking on the “Holidays to Berlin” link within it. Since the Germany hub page should rank strongly, it is also conferring ranking to the Berlin page which should itself start to rank without necessarily having the same external link equity.

Hub Pages and PPC Campaigns
Another significant benefit of having hub pages is when running PPC campaigns. By having a page with deep links that is optimised to the hilt you can then use these pages in your PPC campaigns – they should easily meet the required landing page quality scores. If you can choose the correct “big” search terms you can capitalise on PPC clicks for the searches for broader (and ironically in some cases sometimes less competitive from a PPC perspective) terms and drive people to your excellent content and present a clear set of relevant choices via your internal links on the hub page straight through to the monetising pages.

Hub pages have lots of benefits and are relatively easy to set up too. The key is to define a clear strategy for them, keep them updated and make them as SEO friendly as possible and then watch the page views, and hopefully money start rolling in.

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